Barbara Kruger

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I Shop, Therefore I Am

Barbara Kruger (born 1945) is an American conceptual artist. She was born in Newark, New Jersey and left there in 1964 to attend Syracuse University. After a year at Syracuse, she moved to New York, where she began attending Parsons School of Design. She studied with Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel, who, as a graphic designer and art director for Harper's Bazaar in the 1960s, introduced Kruger to photographers and fashion/magazine sub-cultures. After a year at Parsons, Kruger left school and started to work at Mademoiselle magazine as an entry-level designer, becoming chief designer within a year. During the late 1960s and early 1970s she also designed book covers for political texts and became increasingly interested in poetry, writing and in regularly attended readings. From 1976 to 1980 Kruger lived in Berkeley, CA, teaching as well as doing design work and reflecting on her art. In the 1980s she became known for her fine art work incorporating experience in graphic design and picture editing with short direct phrases.

Much of Kruger's graphic work consists of black-and-white photographs with overlaid captions set in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique. The phrases included in her work are usually declarative, and make common use of such pronouns as "you", "I", "we", and "they". The juxtaposition of Kruger's imagery with text containing criticism of sexism and the circulation of power within cultures is a recurring motif in the work.

In The text in her work of the 1980s includes such phrases as "Your comfort is my silence" (1981), "you invest in the divinity of the masterpiece" (1982), and "I shop therefore I am" (1987). She has said that "I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are and who we aren’t."

In 1980 she had her first solo exhibition at P.S. 1, Long Island City, New York. In 1987 she joined the then dominant contemporary art gallery of Mary Boone, and has had eight solo shows there since.

Her messages have been displayed in both galleries and public spaces, as well as framed and unframed photographs, posters, postcards, t-shirts, electronic signboards, billboards and on a train station platform in Strasbourg, France. For the past decade Kruger has created installations of video, film, audio and projection. Enveloping the viewer with the seductions of direct address, her work is consistently about the kindnesses and brutalities of social life: about how we are to one another.

Kruger's works are direct and evoke an immediate response. Usually her style involves the cropping of a magazine or newspaper image enlarged in black and white. The enlargement of the image is done as crudely as possible to monumental proportions. A message is stenciled on the image, usually in white letters against a background of red. The text and image are unrelated in an effort to create anxiety by the audience that plays on the fears of society." (Janson, p. 992).

In 2005 Kruger was honored at the 51st Venice Biennale with the "Golden Lion" for Lifetime Achievement. Kruger is currently a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles.

In 2007, Kruger was one of the many artists to be a part of South Korea's Incheon Women Artists' Biennale in Seoul. This marked South Korea's first women's biennial. [1]

Contents

[edit] Books

  • Barbara Kruger: 7 January to 28 January 1989, by Barbara Kruger, Mary Boone Gallery, 1989
  • Barbara Kruger: 5 January to 26 January 1991, by Barbara Kruger, 1991
  • Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearances by Barbara Kruger, 1994
  • Love for Sale, by Kate Linker, 1996
  • Remaking History (Discussions in Contemporary Culture, No 4) by Barbara Kruger, 1998
  • Thinking of You, 1999 (The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles)
  • Barbara Kruger, by Angela Vettese, 2002
  • Money Talks by Barbara Kruger and Lisa Phillips, 2005

[edit] Film and Video

  • "Pleasure, Pain, Desire, Disgust". 1997
  • "Twelve". 2004

[edit] References

  1. ^ South Korea Kicks off First Women's Biennial, ARTINFO, November 6, 2007, http://www.artinfo.com/news/story/26010/south-korea-kicks-off-first-womens-biennial/, retrieved on 2008-04-16 
  • Janson, H.W., Janson, Anthony F. History of Art. Harry N. Abrams, Inc., Publishers. 6 edition. January 1, 2005. ISBN 0-13-182895-9
  • Linker, Kate. Love For Sale: Words and Pictures of Barbara Kruger. New York: Harry N. Abrams Inc., 1996.
  • Femme brut(e), [exhibition catalogue] New London: Lyman Allyn Art Museum, 2006.
  • “Barbara Kruger” ACCA Education Kit. Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. http://www.accaonline.org.au/Assets/12/1/BarbaraKrugeredkit-1.pdf

[edit] External links

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