ART-PRESENTATION: Barbara Kruger-Forever
Since the late 1970s, Barbara Kruger has established herself as one of the most influential figures in contemporary art. Beginning with her earliest works, for which she combined language with mass media imagery culled from books and magazines, she has turned a critical eye toward consumerism, desire, political will, and the often-hidden mechanisms of power operating within contemporary society. In the mid-1990s, Kruger produced her first multichannel video works and room-wrappings, tapping into a long-standing interest in architecture and expanding the scale of her installations to envelop viewers in disorienting, but thought-provoking, environments.
By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Amorepacific Museum of Art Archive
Featuring her major works from the 1980s up to her most recent room-wrap text installation Barbara Kruger presents “Forever”, her first solo exhibition in an Asian Museum, at the Amorepacific Museum of Art in Seoul. There is also a video installation, and a world premiere of Kruger’s new works using the Korean alphabet. The 6-meter-high and 20-meter-wide mural, titled “Untitled (Plenty Should be Enough)” has been installed at the entrance to the exhibition. Kruger’s 16 small, black framed works, including “Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face)” (1981) and “Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground)” (1989), are seminal early paste-ups in which a text-image aesthetic deals with visual codes and the general production of knowledge. Equally insightful are Kruger’s 1980s black and white works in her signature red frame, and “Untitled (Project for Dazed and Confused)” (1996), which consists of six large-scale prints showing wry first-person imaginings of inner thoughts. Her four-channel video installation entitled “The Globe Shrinks” (2010) and a large-scale room-wrap installation “Untitled (Forever)” (2017) both invite visitors into an immersive experience inside a thought-provoking environment. “Untitled (Plenty Should Be Enough)” (2018) and its Korean version “Untitled” (2019), together with “Untitled” (2019) (all of them are specially designed by the artist for this exhibition) convey the artist’s commentary on consumerism, desire, politics, and other less obvious mechanisms of power that operate within contemporary society. In Kruger’s work “Untitled (Forever)” (2017), large texts covering all four walls and floor of the exhibition room, provides a visual shock with its exceptionally large scale and unusual presentation. The key thoughts mirror sentences from Virginia Woolf and George Orwell and thus unfold the artist’s ideas over the last 40 years in a very intense and immersive way. This work has been re-designed by the artist specifically for the Amorepacific Museum of Art and reveals her long-standing interest in architecture and the expanding scale of her installations. A specially prepared “archive room” helps the viewer to broaden and deepen our understanding of Barbara Kruger and of her creations, by showcasing magazines and newspapers she designed and participated in, together with an interview film with her in her own words.
Info: Curator: Kyoungran Kim, Amorepacific Museum of Art, 100 Hangang-daero, Yongsan-gu, Seoul, Duration: 27/6-29/12/19, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-18:00, http://apma.amorepacific.com
