Barbara Kruger
New York, 519, 525 & 533 West 19th Street
Kruger powerfully and directly engages with viewers through her distinctive visual language, utilizing images, text, and technology as tools of communication to reveal and question established power structures and social constructs. The exhibition will feature nine large-scale video works and installations, as well as sound installations and vinyl wallpaper, that not only reaffirm the cultural prominence of Kruger’s iconic visual language but reveal the radical inventiveness and lasting relevance of her incisive work with pictures and words. The exhibition will feature a major new video installation, Untitled (No Comment) (2020). Over the course of this immersive three-channel work, Kruger combines text, images, and audio clips with a barrage of found memes and other internet mainstays, ranging from blurred-out selfies to animated photos of cats, that foreground twenty-first-century modes of content consumption.
Image: Barbara Kruger, Untitled (Cast of characters), 2016/2020
A number of the works on view reconfigure in new digital formats some of the most well-known examples from Kruger’s oeuvre, transforming these previously static images into dynamic video works that engage with the visual paradigm of the current moment. In 2019 the artist began creating a series of animated “replays,” each one augmented with striking sound effects, in which she translates her iconic pasteup collages from the 1980s to this new format. Five of Kruger’s replays will be on view: Untitled (I shop therefore I am) (1987/2019), Untitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989/2019), Untitled (Admit nothing/Blame everyone/Be bitter) (1987/2020), Untitled (Our Leader) (1987/2020), and Untitled (Remember me) (1988/2020).
Also featured will be Pledge, Will, Vow (1988/2020)—currently included in the 59th Venice Biennale, as well as in Kruger’s solo exhibition at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin—in which transcripts of the US Pledge of Allegiance, traditional marriage vows, and a last will and testament are “typed” on-screen as if being composed and revised in real time. Likewise, in Untitled (Artforum) (2016/2020), Kruger animates her original cover design for the celebrated art publication’s Summer 2016 issue. “Job Description,” a 1979 short prose piece by Kruger, is incrementally transformed into the meta-referential video installation Untitled (The work is about...) (1979/2020), which outlines the multiplicity of ideas and actions that can comprise the notions of engagement and labor.
The exhibition will coincide with a large-scale site-specific installation by the artist titled Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You. in the Marron Family Atrium of The Museum of Modern Art, New York, on view from July 16, 2022, to January 2, 2023. Kruger’s atrium commission is presented in conjunction with a major solo exhibition devoted to the artist’s work that was on view at the Art Institute of Chicago in the fall of 2021 and traveled to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, where it is now on view through July 17, 2022.
