Barbara Kruger: the legendary US artist who always speaks her mind
Since the 70s, Barbara Kruger has made provocative, text-based art her signature, honing a graphic style that is as widely recognized as it is imitated. Combining found images, color and text into explosive collages, Kruger borrows from the visual language of mass advertising and state propaganda to pose challenging questions on the fragile state of our civil freedoms. Kruger is a Distinguished Professor of New Genres at the UCLA Department of Art.
"Few artists pack a punch like Barbara Kruger. Since the 70s, the US artist had made provocative, text-based art her signature, honing a graphic style that is as widely recognised as it is imitated. At the heart of Kruger’s enduring appeal is her gift for dissent. Combining found images, colour and text into explosive collages, Kruger borrows from the visual language of mass advertising and state propaganda to pose challenging questions on the fragile state of our civil freedoms.
Kruger’s gift for words and resonant, punchy slogans began with her passion for poetry, which she wrote alongside her studies at Parsons School of Design in the mid-60s. But it was her 1978 work Picture/Reading that provided the greatest clue of what was to follow. For this series, Kruger combined her own architectural photographs of domestic Californian vernacular with entire paragraphs of cinematic text.
In one example, shadows from a midday sun fall across the kitsch exterior of a Californian home, complete with faux Corinthian balustrades. In the accompanying text we meet Gail, a submissive, scantily clad housewife who wiles away the hours waiting for her man to return by sleeping, smoking and watching TV. With strong feminist undertones and a strong interplay between image and text, the work offered an early taste of Kruger’s to deliver an evocative narrative in a single snapshot."— Finn Blythe, Jan. 27, 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the HERO Magazine website.
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