Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist associated with the Pictures Generation. Addressing issues of language and sign, Kruger has often been grouped with such feminist postmodern artists as Martha Rosler (born 1943), Sherrie Levine (born 1947), Jenny Holzer (born 1950) and Cindy Sherman (born 1954). Like Holzer and Sherman she uses the techniques of mass communication and advertising to explore issues like gender and identity. Kruger’s heartfelt desire to represent and challenge “how we are to one another” provides a “broad sort of scope” for her work.

Kruger is most known for her collage style that consists of black-and-white photographs, overlaid with declarative captions, stated in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed text. The phrases in her works often include pronouns such as “you”, “your”, “I”, “we”, and “they”, addressing cultural constructions of power, identity, consumerism, and sexuality. Kruger’s artistic mediums include photography, sculpture, graphic design, architecture, as well as video and audio installations.

Barbara Kruger’s artistic practice has consistently sought to deconstruct the methods of advertising and mass media. After studying at Parsons in the early 1950s and taking courses with Diane Arbus, Kruger cultivated an impressive career in graphic design; she designed for Condé Nast Publications such as Aperture, and eventually became the head designer for Mademoiselle magazine. Aside from her graphic design work, Kruger became increasingly frustrated with her artistic output of the 1960s, which engaged with the feminist recuperation of craft and material, with wall hangings of yarn, beads and ribbons; she believed this work was too far removed from her growing interests in contemporary social and political issues.

She turned to photography in the mid-1970s, and by the 1980s, had defined agitprop style that calls upon the visual language of mass media and advertisement. Using found photographs in addition to her own, and playing with the interplay of text, image and typography, Kruger produces searing criticisms of the manipulative nature of capitalist marketing and its implicit misogyny. She undermines the nature of sexualized and objectified women, as well as the effective methods of popular advertisement to bring attention to the ways in which these methods affect the viewer and the development of popular culture. Her subversion of print media culture successfully decodes the language that manipulates audiences, and questions – and rejects – the ingrained nature of the male gaze in everyday imagery.

Kruger’s words and pictures have been displayed in both galleries and public spaces, as well as offered as framed and unframed photographs, posters, postcards, T-shirts, electronic signboards and façade banners. She has consistently installed her work in public spaces like buses, civic buildings, train stations and billboards, in addition to the galleries and museums that display her work.

In 1979, Barbara Kruger exhibited her first works combining appropriated photographs and fragments of superimposed text at P.S. 1 Contemporary Art Center, in Long Island City, Queens. Her first institutional show was staged in London, when Iwona Blazwick decided to exhibit her work at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in 1983. In 1999, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles mounted the first retrospective exhibition to provide a comprehensive overview of Kruger’s career since 1978; the show travelled to the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York in 2000. Kruger has been the subject of many one-person exhibitions, including shows organized by the Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (1985); Serpentine Gallery in London (1994); Palazzo delle Papesse Centro Arte Contemporanea in Siena (2002); the Museum of Contemporary Art, San Diego (2005) and Moderna Museet in Stockholm (2008).

In 2009, Kruger was included among the seminal artists whose work was exhibited in The Pictures Generation, 1974 - 1984 at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA. Kruger has also participated in the Whitney Biennial (1983, 1985, and 1987) as well as Documenta 7 and 8 (1982 and 1987). She represented the United States at the Venice Biennale in 1982 and participated in 2005 (when she received the prestigious Leone d’Oro award for lifetime achievement) and 2022.

Kruger lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. She has written about television, film, and culture for Artforum,Esquire, The New York Times and The Village Voice, and is also an Emerita Distinguished Professor of New Genres at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture, Los Angeles, USA. In 2021, Kruger was included in Time magazine’s annual list of the 100 Most Influential People and on the 16th of November 2022, Kruger’s 1982 photo Untitled (My face is your fortune), was sold at Sotheby’s, New York for a record $1,562,500 (including buyer’s premium).

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