Jonathan Meese is a conceptual artist working within a diverse practice that includes performance, installation, painting, and sculpture, mainly addressing themes of power, desire, and identity. His artistic practice is a composite of historical, legendary and science fiction references, evoking various real or fictitious figures all of whom represent different facets of the artist’s identity. Meese’s work is featured in several private and public collections internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Centre Georges Pompidou, Rubell Family Collection, Miami; Paris; Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk; the Sammlung Goetz, Munich; Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; Hall Art Foundation, New York; Musées de la Ville de Strasbourg, France; De La Cruz Collection, Miami, among others. Since the early 2000s, Meese has developed as a figure and propagandist for what he calls the Dictatorship of Art, which is a philosophy of art that is grounded in a self-generated abundance, independent of any ideological structures. His performative interventions are accompanied with paintings, collage-drawings and sculptures merging pop cultural and historical figures with political manifestos. The work Dr. No’s Verdun as many others, stylistically, relate to the German Neo-Expressionists of the 1980s; artists such as Albert Oehlen (with whom Meese has collaborated), Jörg Immendorf, and Martin Kippenberger. In a globalised world, where demagogues have exercised real power over human lives, Meese’s self-performance forces the viewer to choose sides, either between parody and propaganda or artistic freedom and socio-political agency.