Untitled (BP Landscape),

2010

Josephine Meckseper's BP Landscapes refer to the explosion of the British Petroleum drilling rig Deepwater Horizon in 2010. That said, the small, colorful works that make up the series appear more contemplative than apocalyptic. Indeed, instead of allegorizing a major environmental disaster, they seem to continue the Modernist investigation of abstraction, gesture, and the underlying structure of the support. This contradiction likely is the point of Meckseper's BP Landscapes: the works' lines and colors, which are not unlike those produced at sunset in heavily polluted cities, might suggest that the formal language of painting is unequal to the representation of ecological disaster, whose effects exceed our attempts to give them form.