Barbara Kruger: a path with words

She created some of the most memorable works of her time. Today, the artist-activist is back with two immersive exhibitions, at MoMA and the David Zwirner Gallery.

Barbara Kruger changed the way the world looked — its visual language, including art, advertising and graphics. She has been less successful in changing the way the world works, especially when it comes to gender injustices - the oppression of women in its infinite variety, the domination of men (ditto) - and scourges such as war, consumerism and poverty.

< p class="css-at9mc1 evys1bk0">But it's surely not for lack of trying. Since the late 1980s, Kruger has applied her skills as an artist, feminist, writer, and graphic designer to some of the most memorable and resonant public art of her time. Currently, the intensity of his efforts can be seen in two immersive exhibitions in Manhattan: a large installation titled "Thinking of You. em class="css-2fg4z9 e1gzwzxm0">Me. I mean you." which wraps in language the expansive Marron family atrium of the Museum of Modern Art - floor and walls - and a battalion of individual pieces filling the spacious 19th Street galleries of David Zwirner, who began representing the artist in 2019, in collaboration with Sprüth Magers. /p>

Kruger is known for his glamorous red-framed montages that begin with slightly archaic black-and-white photographs that give off an elevated air of the 1950s. a large stock image of - an archive that Kruger has assembled from magazines, newspapers and picture books over the decades.) To these she adds her own terse, almost koan-like sentences, direct observations and imperatives that are contemporary in economy and style—usually a few words in a blocky white sans serif font on one or more bands or blocks of red.

Image "Barbara Kruger", an exhibition at David Zwirner's 19th Street Galleries in Chelsea, includes "Untitled (Your body is a battleground)", made for the first time in 1989 and here transformed into a video on Panel L ED.Credit...via David Zwirner

These word-image combinations ranged in size from small posters surreptitiously pasted on urban walls during his early years, to paint mural-size works and, more recently, digital screens. They tell terrible truths about society, history and our own mentalities that Kruger rightly refuses to call "political art". His lyrics tap into our inner lives and challenge our often naïve assumptions about our own machinations and those of the world. As she described, with her usual lack of polish, in Interview: "My work has always been about power and control and bodies and money and that kind of stuff."

Many of Kruger's phrases have filtered into global consciousness, if they weren't already famous by George Orwell, Tina Turner or - in the case of the initial confession of "Untitled (I shop therefore I am)" - Descartes. The words appear in a silkscreen print, created by Kruger in 1987, in a red square offered by a large (genderless) hand.

Most famous of all is a statement obviously in fact, put metaphorically: "Untitled (Your body is a battlefield)." These five words punctuate the face of a woman divided in two into positive and negative images, that is to say into opposite sides. Kruger first offered to make a poster of it promoting