ART CITIES:Berlin-Barbara Kruger
The large, bold artworks of Barbara Kruger assimilate words and images from the deluge of contemporary mass media. Employing media effects and strategies, Kruger creates her own sexual, social, and political messages, challenging the stereotypical ways mass media influences society’s notions about gender roles, social relationships, and political issues.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Sprüth Magers Gallery Archive
Marking 30 years since Barbara Kruger’s collaboration with the Gallery, the artist presents “FOREVER”, a new site-specific work. For this installation, which occupies all four walls and the floor of the Berlin gallery’s main exhibition space, the artist has created one of her immersive room-wraps and several new vinyl works. Their boldly designed textual statements on the nature of truth, power, belief and doubt embody the distinctive visual language that Kruger has developed over the course of her career. Kruger’s earliest artworks date to 1969. Large woven wall hangings of yarn, beads, sequins, feathers, and ribbons, they exemplify the feminist recuperation of craft during this period. Despite her inclusion in the Whitney Biennial in 1973 and solo exhibitions at Artists Space and Fischbach Gallery, both in New York, the following two years, she was dissatisfied with her output and its detachment from her growing social and political concerns. In the fall of 1976, Kruger abandoned art making and moved to Berkeley, California, where she taught at the University of California for four years and steeped herself in the writings of Walter Benjamin and Roland Barthes. She took up photography in 1977, producing a series of black-and-white details of architectural exteriors paired with her own textual ruminations on the lives of those living inside. Published as an artist’s book, “Picture/Readings” (1979) foreshadows the aesthetic vocabulary Kruger developed in her mature work. By 1979 Barbara Kruger stopped taking photographs and began to employ found images in her art, mostly from mid-century American print-media sources, with words collaged directly over them. Her 1980 untitled piece commonly known as “Perfect” portrays the torso of a woman, hands clasped in prayer, evoking the Virgin Mary, the embodiment of submissive femininity; the word perfect is emblazoned along the lower edge of the image. These early collages in which Kruger deployed techniques she had perfected as a graphic designer, inaugurated the artist’s ongoing political, social, and especially feminist provocations and commentaries on religion, sex, racial and gender stereotypes, consumerism, corporate greed, and power. During the early ‘80s Barbara Kruger perfected a signature agitprop style, using cropped, large-scale, black-and-white photographic images juxtaposed with raucous, pithy, and often ironic aphorisms, printed in Futura Bold typeface against black, white, or deep red text bars. The inclusion of personal pronouns in works implicates viewers by confounding any clear notion of who is speaking. These rigorously composed mature works function successfully on any scale. In recent years Barbara Kruger has extended her aesthetic project, creating public installations of her work in galleries, museums, municipal buildings, train stations, and parks, as well as on buses and billboards around the world. Walls, floors, and ceilings are covered with images and texts, which engulf and even assault the viewer. Since the late 1990s, Kruger has incorporated sculpture into her ongoing critique of modern American culture. “Justice” (1997) depicts J. Edgar Hoover and Roy Cohn, two right-wing public figures who hid their homosexualityin partial drag, kissing one another.
Info: Sprüth Magers Gallery, Oranienburger Straße 18, Berlin, Duration: 16/9-22/12/17, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 11:00-18:00, www.spruethmagers.com