Simon Lee Gallery is pleased to present a solo exhibition of new works by Josephine Meckseper. On view at the gallery’s Hong Kong space from 4 November 2022 – 7 January 2023, this exhibition will comprise new paintings, a vitrine, and a film work informed by the evolution and surroundings of her work practice.

Throughout her career, Josephine Meckseper’s large-scale vitrine installations and films have melded the aesthetic language of early modernism with her own imagery of historical undercurrents. Her works, encompassing sculpture, painting, photography, and film, simultaneously expose and encase cultural signifiers and everyday objects to form an investigation into the collective unconscious of our time. The works for this exhibition, made between 2020 – 2022, come together to explore the concept of recycling, tracing, and capturing matter and memory as experienced by the artist during these unprecedented years.

Amongst the works on show will be The Empire of Signs, a wood and glass vitrine titled after Roland Barthes’s eponymous book. In The Empire of Signs, Barthes describes a “novelistic object” that allows him to remotely isolate a certain number of features somewhere in the world, out of which to form a new system of signs. Similarly, the vitrine encases a collection of objects between which a network of subtle correlations exists - connected loosely by their previous or current functions, location, and relation to other objects within the exhibition.

Spray-painted canvases continue the rhythm of the objects assembled in The Empire of Signs. These works chart the contours of the objects encased within the vitrine to form images reminiscent of abandoned dinner table settings and shelf displays. Their hand-painted textured surfaces evoke Roy Lichtenstein’s half-tone Ben-Day dots and Sigmar Polke’s “dot” paintings, as well as Robert Rauschenberg’s early blueprints and cyanotypes conceived in collaboration with Susan Weil. Meckseper’s new paintings, titled after chapters of Michel Foucault’s The Order of Things, from 1966, point to his thesis of an “archaeological” approach to the history of meaning and representation – suggesting that words are now entirely transparent and arbitrary counters. Consequently, to name things is to put them in a kind of necessary order (photo: Josephine Meckseper: „The Anthropological Sleep“, 2022, acrylic on canvas, 152,4 x 121,92 x 3,81 cm, 60 x 48 x 1 1/2 in.)