Diving deep into 40 years of Barbara Kruger’s radical art
A new book, "Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You," gathers together four decades of provocative artwork by seminal artist and UCLA Department of Art Distinguished Professor Barbara Kruger – and shows us why we need her eye on the world more than ever.
Barbara Kruger, Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You (2019) © Barbara Kruger, digital image courtesy of the artist "Barbara Kruger has been holding the hierarchies of power to ransom with her powerful, provocative, statements since she came to prominence in the 1980s. Often recognisable for their signature white-on-red Helvetica and Futura fonts and their striking black and white imagery, her style owe a great deal to her training in design. As a designer at Condé Nast, Kruger mastered the persuasive visual language of advertising.
“One thing I learned working at magazines was that if you couldn’t get people to look at a page or a cover, then you were fired,” she told The National Gallery of Art. “It was all about how you create arresting works, and by arresting I mean stop people, even for a nano-second.” As she began experimenting with art, she harnessed this visual language to promote more subversive values, such as questioning authority, consumer culture, and inequality.
A new book, Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You, gathers together this seminal artist’s vast body of work. From the analogue paste-ups of the 1980s to her digital works of the last two decades, the anthology traces Kruger’s evolving practice, taking in the groundbreaking artist’s many site-specific installations, works on vinyl, and multichannel videos, among many other mediums." — Emily Dinsdale, Jun. 11, 2021
This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Dazed & Confused Magazine website.
Read more about Barbara Kruger.
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