ART CITIES: N.York-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: MoMA Archive

One of the most significant and visible artists of our time, Barbara Kruger is a curious consumer and an incisive critic of popular culture, well known for using direct address as a rhetorical strategy to undermine and expose the power dynamics underscoring identity construction, desire, and consumerism. Covering the various surfaces of MoMA’s Marron Family Atrium’s walls and floor with printed vinyl, “Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You”, the new commission at MoMA features the artist’s trademark bold textual statements on ideas of truth, power, belief, doubt, and desire. Based in Los Angeles and New York, Barbara Kruger has been creating powerful interrogations of social relations imbued with humor and urgency for more than 40 years, combining images and iconography drawn from mass-media photographs and emblazoning them with provocatively concise language. In 1980, Kruger formally exhibited her first works that overlaid fragments of text on photographs at P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center (now MoMA PS1), and in 1988 she curated Picturing “Greatness,” an exhibition at MoMA drawn from the Museum’s photography collection. Since the 1980s, Kruger has presented her ideas in three-dimensional environments, often combining large-scale room wraps, multichannel videos, and installations on building facades. The installation taps into Kruger’s long-standing interest in architecture and desire to envelop viewers in a commanding and thought-provoking environment, notably offering multiple points of entry and perspective into and onto the work. Visitors on the Museum’s second floor are able to walk on the vinyl-covered floor, entering into the space of the piece, while those on upper floors will be able to look down into the space Kruger will define. With characteristic force, the work’s text and design draw attention to the viewer’s spectatorial position, taking advantage of the Marron Family Atrium’s unique architecture to set up relationships between spatial and political power, exploring the ways these relationships can expand to considerations of inclusion and exclusion, dominance and agency.

Photo: Barbara Kruger. Thinking of You . I Mean Me. I Mean You. 2019. Digital image courtesy of the artist

Info: Curators: Peter Eleey, and Lanka Tattersall, MoMA (Museum of Modern Art), 11 West 53 Street, Manhattan, New York, NY, USA, Duration: 16/7/2022-2/1/2023, Days & Hours: Mon-Fri & Sun 10:30-17:30, Sat 10:30-19:00, www.moma.org/