Barbara Kruger
Text as image.
Barbara Kruger combines black-and-white photographs with red text bars: “Your body is a battleground.” The works look like advertising but critique power.
Barbara Kruger was born in 1945 in Newark, New Jersey. She studied at Syracuse University and then at Parsons School of Design in New York, where the photographer Diane Arbus was one of her teachers. Instead of going straight into the art world, she began working in magazines. She became a designer at the fashion magazine Mademoiselle and then worked as a picture editor. That experience proved decisive.
Around 1980 she found the form that made her famous. She took black-and-white pictures from magazines and advertising, cropped them tightly and overlaid short texts in white capitals on red bars. The typeface was usually Futura Bold Oblique. The texts address the viewer directly with words like “you”, “we” and “I”, and ask who has the power to speak and who is being looked at.
Among her best-known works are Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face) of 1981 and Untitled (I shop therefore I am) of 1987, a play on Descartes aimed at consumer society. Untitled (Your body is a battleground) was made in 1989 for a march in Washington in support of abortion rights. The image has since been used in protests around the world.
Kruger also works on a large scale. She has covered entire walls, floors and façades with text, in museums, on buses and billboards and in public spaces, so that visitors walk straight into the message. She has made video and sound installations and written criticism of film and television. For many years she has taught, among other places at the University of California, Los Angeles.
Her visual language has become so familiar that it has been copied by the very advertising she critiques. The red-and-white logo of the streetwear brand Supreme is clearly inspired by her. Kruger received a Golden Lion for lifetime achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2005. She belongs to the so-called Pictures Generation and is one of the most important feminist artists in the United States.