“Do you know why language manifests itself the way it does in my work? It’s because I understand short attention spans.” – Barbara Kruger.
Barbara Kruger is an American graphic designer and pop artist. Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1945 and attended Syracuse University and Parson School of Design. Her early career began at Conde Nast in 1966 when she got her first job at Mademoiselle magazine as a doing layout design. Later she worked as a freelance designer, art director, and photo editor at other magazines including “House and Garden” and “Aperture”.
In the late 1960s, Kruger began creating artwork outside of her design work, first using textiles, her own photography, and later found photography. Kruger’s style is influenced by her work as a graphic designer. Some of her most recognizable work includes black and white images with overlaid text (usually red, white, and black) in Futura Bold Oblique font. The themes of Kruger’s work include feminism, politics, corporate greed, consumerism, sexism/ misogyny, classism, and autonomy/ desire.
I admire how striking Kruger’s work is. The bluntness of the messages and the way she marries images and text is very direct yet provocative. One of the first times I remember being consciously exposed to Kruger’s work was on a visit to the Hirshhorn Museum in D.C. a few years ago. Her room-wrap installation “Belief+Doubt” (2012, pictured above) is incredibly overwhelming to see in person. Messages bombard the viewer from all angles and combine to create different, but related messages based on the order they are read. I remember being taken aback by the installation based on its sheer size and chaos of it. I loved that such a simple technique could be applied in such an exaggerated way to create this effect.
Jessica Blahut 