Barbara Kruger

1. Barbara Kruger Feminist artist "I have no complaints, except for the world." - Barbara Kruger.

2. Who is Barbara Kruger? • Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1945. She attended Syracuse University, the School of Visual Arts, in which she studied art and design • She worked as a graphic designer, art director, and picture editor in the art departments at “House and Garden,” “Aperture,” and other publications. • She has taught at the California Institute of Art, The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley.

3. Her style • Barbara Kruger's graphic work usually consists of black-and-white photographs with overlaid captions set in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique. • The phrases usually make a bold statement and commonly use pronouns such as you, I, your, we and they. She uses imagery text containing criticism of sexism/misogyny and cultural power structures. Much of her text questions the viewer about feminism, classicism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, although her black-and-white images are culled from the mainstream magazines that sell the very ideas she is disputing. • She layers found photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to. In their trademark black letters against a slash of red background, some of her instantly recognizable slogans read “I shop therefore I am,” and “Your body is a battleground

4. Barbara Kruger produced three large-scale gallery installations between 1989 and 1991. In these works, the artist transferred words and images directly to the surfaces of the gallery. Each installation featured a text written on the floor in white type on a red ground. This text read: "All that seemed beneath you is speaking to you now. All that seemed deaf hears you. All that seemed dumb knows what's on your mind. All that seemed blind sees through you. All that seemed silent is putting the words right into your mouth." With a directness that is characteristic of Kruger's work, the text addresses the viewer's sense of certainty with the world. In Kruger's installation, the floor now has a voice, the walls can hear you, and the architecture is manipulating the way you speak.

6. Kruger has been commissioned to design covers for numerous magazines, from Esquire and Newsweek to The New York Times Book Review. She has also created posters on subjects ranging from reproductive rights to a short film by Jonathan Demme and the backdrop for the Rage Against the Machine 1997 tour. Most recently, she has made life-size white fiberglass statues.

7. Power is embedded in the signs and icons of culture, media, advertisement.

8. “Pictures and words seem to become the rallying points for certain assumptions. There are assumptions of truth and falsity and I guess the narratives of falsity are called fictions. I replicate certain words and watch them stray from or coincide with the notions of fact and fiction.” Barbara Kruger

9. “Between Being Born and Dying” Exhibition The exhibition is at The Lever House Art Collection in New York until November 21st.