Barbara Kruger Questions the World by Provocative Art

“Your body is a battleground,” the artist’s work says. “YOU ARE HERE, LOOKING THROUGH THE GLASS, DARKLY.” “You thrive on mistaken identity.” It’s all about “you.” 

Known worldwide for her iconic text-based works that examine the consequences of capitalism, bodily autonomy, and more she is one of the most famous artists of the current moment. 

For more than four decades Barbara Kruger has produced the most trenchant examples of feminist art, superimposing witty texts on purloined images, hoisting the everyday assumptions of patriarchy and plutocracy on their own petards.

"I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are, what we want to be, and what we become."

Since the 1980s, Kruger has been producing her punchy art, which mimes the look of advertising and uses it toward more propagandistic ends. 

She has done this seriously playful work at every scale, from matchbook covers to giant billboards, and across many types of media, including blunt photomontages and immersive screen-and-audio installations. 

Her pieces often take the form of cryptic statements written in a sans serif font that recalls advertising copy; they’re printed on vinyl and black-and-white photographs and have appeared in museums and public spaces around the world for four decades. 

Her work—which has been copied by fashion brands, sometimes with Kruger’s blessing and more often without it—is graphic, sharp, and attractive. 

Always alert to questions of audience and venue, Kruger forever seeks new ways to intervene in the public sphere, drawing political debate into artistic practice and vice versa. 

Kruger’s unsettling art considers the ways ideas are transmitted through mass media and how those concepts inform our own identities. 

Barbara Kruger was born in 1945 in Newark, New Jersey. Kruger briefly attended Syracuse University, then Parsons School of Design in New York City. Kruger worked in graphic design at Mademoiselle magazine and was promoted to head designer within a year.

In 1979, Kruger developed her signature style using large-scale black-and-white images overlaid with text. She repurposed found images, juxtaposing them with short, pithy phrases printed in Futura Bold or Helvetica Extra Bold typeface in black, white, or red text bars.