Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger, the American conceptual artist, is renowned for her multi-layered photographs, which present provocative statements addressing topics such as commercial culture, feminism, and identity politics. 

Biography of Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945 and departed in 1964 to attend Syracuse University. She developed an early interest in graphic design, poetry, and writing, frequently attending poetry readings. After a year at Syracuse, she relocated to New York in 1965 to enroll at the Parsons School of Design. While at Parsons, she studied with photographer Diane Arbus, who introduced her to other photographers and the subcultures of fashion magazines.

After a year, Kruger left school and joined Condé Nast Publications in 1966. Shortly after, she began working at the Mademoiselle magazine as an entry-level designer, quickly advancing to head designer within a year. Her roles later expanded to include graphic designer, art director, and picture editor in various art departments. 

Kruger's earliest artworks can be traced back to 1969 when she created large woven wall hangings using yarn, beads, sequins, feathers, and ribbons. These pieces exemplify the feminist embrace of craft during that era. Despite being featured in the Whitney Biennial in 1973 and having solo exhibitions at Artists Space and Fischbach Gallery in New York during the following two years, Kruger felt dissatisfied with her work and its disconnect from her burgeoning social and political concerns.

In the autumn of 1976, Kruger made a significant shift. She abandoned her ongoing projects and relocated to Berkeley, California, where she taught at the University of California for four years while immersing herself in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. In 1977, she began her venture into photography, creating a series of black-and-white photo works featuring architectural exteriors paired with her brief writings. This series was compiled and published as an artist's book in 1979 titled "Picture/Readings," offering a glimpse into the aesthetic language that Kruger would develop further in her later work.

By 1979, Kruger had transitioned from photography to using found images in her art, often sourced from mid-century American print media. She would then overlay these images with words, directly collaged onto them. For instance, one of her well-known pieces, commonly referred to as "Perfect," depicts the torso of a woman with hands clasped in prayer, reminiscent of the Virgin Mary, with the word "perfect" inserted along the lower edge of the image. These early collages marked Kruger's entry into a world of ongoing political, social, and feminist provocations.

During the early 1980s, Barbara Kruger honed her distinctive agitprop style, characterized by cropped, large-scale, black-and-white photographic images juxtaposed with ironic aphorisms. These were printed in Futura Bold typeface against black, white, or deep red text bars. 

Starting from the mid-1990s, she ventured into creating large-scale immersive installations that combined video, audio, and text. These installations have the power to completely envelop the viewer and their thoughts. In 1997, she worked on a series of fiberglass sculptures depicting famous (and infamous) celebrities. That same year in New York, she adorned the city with quotations from notable public figures.

For her first retrospective in Los Angeles, Kruger painted 15 billboards with insightful captions in both English and Spanish. Concurrently, she launched a public awareness campaign in the Unified School District of Los Angeles, adorning buses with bold statements like "Give your brain as much attention as you do your hair and you'll be a thousand times better off" or "You want it. You buy it. You forget it."

The artist's exhibitions have graced esteemed institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art and the International Center for Photography in New York, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the National Center for Contemporary Art in Grenoble, France, and the Kunsthalle Basel in Switzerland, among others.

Not limited to gallery walls, Kruger's art has also found its way onto billboards, T-shirts, and various public venues, reaching a wider audience. In recognition of her contributions, she was awarded the prestigious MOCA Award for Distinguished Women in the Arts in 2001.

Barbara Kruger's Art Style

Using black-and-white photographs as a base, Barbara Kruger overlays them with striking red text that is declarative. Her preferred fonts are Futura Bold Oblique and Helvetica Ultra Condensed, often incorporating pronouns like you, I, us, and we to add a personal and dramatic touch to her messages. Kruger is part of a group of feminist postmodern artists that includes Jenny Holzer and Cindy Sherman.

Her mature works, meticulously composed, are effective on any scale. They achieved wide distribution - under Kruger's careful supervision - through various mediums such as umbrellas, bags, postcards, mugs, T-shirts, and posters. This dissemination blurs the boundaries between art and commerce, drawing attention to the influence of advertising in public discourse.

Kruger's work continues to provoke thought and discourse on issues of power, control, and affection. In 2016, she took a nude image of the American celebrity Kim Kardashian as a background for her thought-provoking slogan: "It's all about me - I mean you - I mean me," which was featured as the cover for W Magazine.