The power of Barbara Kruger’s art, in her own words

With Los Angeles currently plastered with her provocative artworks, we draw on the Kruger’s own quot

February 21, 2020

Kruger, internationally known for her distinctive image and text pieces, has been active in a range of fields, including video and audio installation, photography, sculpture, architecture, and graphic design as well as in critical writing, curatorship, and various forms of public advocacy. In 2005, Kruger was included in The Experience of Art at the Venice Biennale and was the recipient of the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement.

“Untitled” (It’s New It’s You), 2014Copyright Barbara Kruger, Courtesy of Mary Boone Gallery, New York

"Barbara Kruger came to prominence in the 1980s when she began making boldly graphic art juxtaposing striking images with provocative, declarative statements in what would become her signature aesthetic (white-on-red Helvetica and Futura fonts). If her work reminds you of propaganda, that’s because it is: it’s propaganda for anti-consumerism, for women’s rights, for equality, and for thinking. 

She told Dazed, “I was born in Newark, New Jersey, a very poor city which was plagued by poverty and deteriorating race relations. I grew up in a working-class home and never had my own room. We lived in a three-room apartment in a black neighbourhood. That experience determined very much what my work later became – my childhood informed my ideas about power, control, hierarchy, and marginalisation.”

Kruger learned her craft working as a graphic designer in magazines in the mid-to-late-1960s, where she grasped the imperative and the technique of engaging the viewer with arresting visuals. Her artwork employs the visual language of branding and advertising to condemn consumer culture and to critique constructs of power, identity, and gender, to promote thought and generate discourse.

Notoriously media-averse and aloof from the celebrity trappings of the art world, Kruger has consistently continued to use her artwork to punch upwards and speak back to power. 

Earlier this month, as part of the Frieze art fair in Los Angeles, Kruger covered the city with banners, billboards, and stickers which read politically-charged statements and questions. With signs asking “WHAT’S HOT WHAT’S NOT?” surround the Banc of California Stadium, and passers-by of the CBS Radio building on Sunset Boulevard confronted by a huge sign asking “WHO BUYS THE CON?”, we take a look at Barbara Kruger’s life and work through the artist’s own words."— Emily Dinsdale, Feb. 21, 2020

This post is an excerpt. Read the full article on the Dazed website.
Read more about Barbara Kruger.

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