The word is a consubstantial element to the work of the artist Barbara Kruger (New Jersey, 80 years) for its form and for its meaning. The images trimmed with magazines, newspapers or ads were the raw material over which in the eighties she, which formed with Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel in the Parsons School of Design and soon landed in the Condé Nast group as art director, registered a message, a slogan, a comment.
His famous collages They are so accurate and powerful today that their relevance becomes even more urgent over the years. Serve as an example one of its first paste-ups which brings together the first great retrospect of the artist in Spain that, from June 24 to November 9, hosts the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. A black and white image, very granulated as if it had been expanded and reproduced in a photocopier, shows two male hands that approach to give a squeeze and separated in the three lines that cross the photo reads: “Do not recognize anything / blame all / show yourself bitter.” Or the famous “Your body is a battlefield” inscribed on the black and white face of a woman divided vertically in positive and negative. That work with which Manhattan wallpaper in 1989 to support the right to women’s abortion returned to the first line, if it ever abandoned it, with the repeal of the law in 2022 in the United States. Kruger’s phrase is so ubiquitous in feminism that it seems part of the collection, and perhaps it is one of the best evidence of this artist’s greatness: his work touches the central nerve of society. Another Day. Another Night, Commissioned by Lekha Hileman Waitoller in Bilbao, it is a good example of this.
Kruger has used for almost half a century the technology he had more by hand to formulate his sharp feminist criticism with the same language that the mass media use. The consumer society, capitalism, equality, women’s rights or supremacism are issues that beat in their work, in an unmistakable tone, with an authentic and intimate echo. “His work is subtle and forceful, at the same time,” says the writer Gary Indiana in a 1999 text that is included in the catalog of the new exhibition.
Precursor of the memesKruger has not stopped thinking and reformulating. Neither to incorporate new technologies with videos; With the sound found on the Internet, which becomes the new “cut” that now uses and is reproduced in several speakers by the Guggenheim; or with the vinyl on which it prints messages of immense letters with which it covers walls or the ground, to convert their works into enveloping capsules. That sea of great letters and messages stuns and does not leave indifferent. Kruger raises new simple, direct and conceptual works on, for example, the loss of concretion that today suffers the idea of truth, a blurred word in one of the rooms of the exhibition. “Digital impression has allowed me to interact with architectural spaces and is much cheaper than the production of giant screen printing,” explains the artist in the interview with Commissioner Lekha Hileman Waitoller that is also included in the catalog. “Please laugh” can be read in one of these immense vinyl, in front of “please cries.”
His latest exhibitions in the Art Institute of Chicago (2021), in Lacma de Los Angeles (2022), in MoMa (2022), in Berlin (2022) have adapted to each space as if they were a custom suit, and the Guggenheim is one more test. A work done exclusively for this museum, Camino (2025), opens the sample marking the route of visitors with phrases in English, Basque and Spanish written on the ground with Paloseco fonts (Bold Bold and Ultra Compressed Helvetic Style) that are unmistakable brand of their works, in which it reproduces an Edgar Allan Poe’s appointment and includes arrows to direct the walk. The game this time is with the green color and not with red, another classic sign of his work, which dominates other rooms.
Welcome to a sea of letters, signs, signifiers and meanings. There is no trick, no egocentric cunning, but a space that speaks. The words of James Baldwin, Frantz Fanon, George Orwell or Virginia Woolf are also included in other rooms in this sample.
His iconic “I shop, therefore I am”(I buy later), registered on the image of a hand that seems stopped in the air when wanting to grab something, it is one of the collages that charge new life on large LED screens in Bilbao. The original work and its message are rebuilt in a video as if they were formed from a puzzle and the message is changing “I buy, then I accumulate”; “I need then I buy”; “I sexteo then I exist”; “I love then I need”; “I die later I was.” The sense of humor, intelligence and direct interlocution, full of doubts and questions, of jokes and turns, account for the thread of thought of this brilliant and unique artist.
Millions of times copied and replicated, by spontaneous and by brands such as Supreme, the Kruger style is omnipresent and, yet, irreproducible because beyond its formal aesthetics is your gaze and words. The artist has refused to prosecute her imitators, and in Untitled. That’s the Way We Do It (Without title. This is how we do, 2011-2020) Create new collages From the images he has found on the Internet of imitations of others. The resignification of what was already there has no brake. The artist herself in the catalog interview wonders: “Who would have thought that haiku would end up being the language of the future? What the brevity of the text would be the great detonator of meanings onlineregardless of the banals that these can be? ”