Barbara Kruger – Studies in New York; first steps as graphic designer
Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey on 26 January 1945. From a working-class family, she received a good school education, but in 1964, broke off her studies at the University of Syracuse due to the unexpected death of her father. In 1965, she attended the Parsons School of Design in New York where she studied with Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel. Whilst working incessantly to establish herself as a serious artist, she designed book covers and worked at Condé Nast Publishers as a graphic designer for the American fashion magazine Mademoiselle, and later became picture editor for House and Garden, Aperture, and other publications. Her close friend Ingrid Sischy encouraged Barbara Kruger to write columns about film, television and music which were published in journals such as Artforum and Reallife. At the end of the 1960s, Kruger also became interested in poetry, took part in readings, and tried her hand as a lyricist.
International breakthrough with pointed collages
In the early 1970s, Barbara Kruger began her exhibition activity in the galleries of New York. Initially, she created large-format wall hangings from such diverse materials as thread, feathers, sequins, pearls, and ribbon. The hand crafts of crochet and sewing, closely associated with women for centuries, were reinterpreted by Kruger for feminist purposes, and she also consciously and provocatively incorporated erotic elements into her work. Marcia Tucker included a few of these pieces in the Whitney Biennale of 1973. Despite this success, Kruger was not content with what she had achieved and took an artistic break where she taught at the University of Berkeley in California and read the writings of Roland Barthes and Walter Benjamin. She took up her artistic practices again in 1977 and turned to architecture. In the early 1980s, she developed a collage technique which would become characteristic for her art and lead oi great international success.
Multi-layered installations with themes of the day
Barbara Kruger often uses advertising photographs as a basis for her famous collages, which are mounted as new artworks with other pictures and texts. With her textual messages, she often speaks directly to institutions or people – using the personal pronouns of ‘You’ and ‘I’. Her art thus maintains an active component, it does not wait for the voluntary approach and participation of a random audience, but deliberately seeks out its addressees. Alongside her collages, Kruger also employs sophisticated installations with projections, video and audio – in Germany, for example, her works were exhibited in 2002 and 2010 in Frankfurt am Main. The election of Donald Trump as US President drove Kruger to a renewed artistic examination of the political daily events in the USA. Barbara Kruger has received prizes and honours for her art, including the Golden Lion for her life’s work at the 51st Biennale die Venezia in 2005 and the Goslarer Kaiserring in 2019.
Barbara Kruger lives and works in New York and Los Angeles.
Barbara Kruger - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz: