PRESENTATION: Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger’s work with pictures and words has become iconic for the reach of its political and social critique. In only a few words, printed large in uppercase block print, Kruger manages to satirize, denounce, and illuminate the uses of power and force in art, culture, and language. The bold, massive statements printed in her signature towering uppercase letters spell out a critique and succinct analysis of the state of politics, desire, sexism, and consumerism today.
By Efi Michalarou
Photo: David Zwirner Gallery Archive
Barbara kruger presents a solo exhibition of recent works in New York. Kruger powerfully and directly engages with viewers through her distinctive visual language, utilizing images, text, and technology as tools of communication to reveal and question established power structures and social constructs. The exhibition will feature nine large-scale video works and installations, as well as sound installations and vinyl wallpaper, that not only reaffirm the cultural prominence of Kruger’s iconic visual language but reveal the radical inventiveness and lasting relevance of her incisive work with pictures and words. The exhibition features a major new video installation, “Untitled (No Comment)” (2020). Over the course of this immersive three-channel work, Kruger combines text, images, and audio clips with a barrage of found memes and other internet mainstays, ranging from blurred-out selfies to animated photos of cats, that foreground twenty-first-century modes of content consumption. A number of the works on view reconfigure in new digital formats some of the most well-known examples from Kruger’s oeuvre, transforming these previously static images into dynamic video works that engage with the visual paradigm of the current moment. In 2019 the artist began creating a series of animated “replays,” each one augmented with striking sound effects, in which she translates her iconic pasteup collages from the 1980s to this new format. Five of Kruger’s replays are view: “Untitled (I shop therefore I am)” (1987/2019), “Untitled (Your body is a battleground)” (1989/2019), “Untitled (Admit nothing/Blame everyone/Be bitter)” (1987/2020), “Untitled (Our Leader)” (1987/2020), and “Untitled (Remember me)” (1988/2020). Also featured is Pledge, “Will, Vow” (1988/2020), currently included in the 59th Venice Biennale, as well as in Kruger’s solo exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, in which transcripts of the US Pledge of Allegiance, traditional marriage vows, and a last will and testament are “typed” on-screen as if being composed and revised in real time. Likewise, in “Untitled (Artforum)” (2016/2020), Kruger animates her original cover design for the celebrated art publication’s Summer 2016 issue. “Job Description,” a 1979 short prose piece by Kruger, is incrementally transformed into the meta-referential video installation Untitled (The work is about…) (1979/2020), which outlines the multiplicity of ideas and actions that can comprise the notions of engagement and labor.
Photo: Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989/2019, Single-channel video on LED panel, sound, 1 min 4 sec, 137 7/8 x 137 7/8 inches (350.1 x 350.1 cm), Edition of 1, 1 AP, © Barbara Kruger, Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner Gallery
Info: David Zwirner Gallery, 519, 525 & 533 West 19th Street New York, NY, USA, Duration: 30/6-12/8/2022, Days & Hours: Tue-Wed 10:00-18:00, Thu 10:00-20:00, Fri 10:00-16:00, www.davidzwirner.com/
