The Hall Art Foundation is pleased to announce an exhibition by renowned American artist Barbara Kruger to be held at its galleries in Reading, Vermont from 11 May – 1 December 2024. Since the 1970s, Kruger has utilized images and words to create powerful, graphic works that prompt us to question what we see and hear in the mainstream media, and to contemplate how our consumption of these messages shape our identity and our world. Spanning more than 30 years of her career, this survey includes over a dozen works that exemplify Kruger’s iconic and distinctive visual language as a means of examining the manipulative power of images.

Kruger first developed a fluency with pictures and words in 1967 when she began working for Condé Nast in the design department at Mademoiselle and House and Garden magazines, designing various editorial spreads by making cut-and-paste combinations of pictures and clips of text, which she called “paste-ups”. Kruger would continue working as a freelance graphic designer and picture editor for magazines and designing book covers until the mid 1970s. Adapting a methodology and style from the world of advertising, Kruger began to develop her own visual vocabulary by juxtaposing images culled from the mass media with provocative slogans and phrases. Kruger’s texts, typically in bold black or white lettering and in her preferred fonts of Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Compressed, address the viewer directly using active verbs and personal pronouns like “I,” “You,” and “We”. Taking the form of evocative statements, questions, or suggestive declarations, these texts are superimposed against images appropriated from manuals and magazines from the 1940s to 1970s, and often set within a signature lacquered red frame. Combined, Kruger’s chosen word / image combinations create new meanings, contradictions, and possible interpretations.

In Untitled (Our Time is Your Money) (1985) the granulated image of a young woman’s face is superimposed with a text set within a circular lens that reads “Our time is your money”. Pressing a pair of tweezers into her cheek, the female looks directly at the viewer. Kruger’s text delineates a division of groups – “our” versus “your”. Who is the “you” being addressed? For example, is Kruger implicating the viewer as a participant in reinforcing stereotypical gender roles and expectations of feminine ideals of beauty? The use of personal pronouns leaves room for the viewer to assess their own position in relation to what is being said, appealing for action instead of passivity.

In Untitled (Love is something you fall into) (1990), Kruger presents the face of a woman seemingly in breathless free-fall with hair dangling down over her face. Importantly, she does not look directly at the viewer, and in fact, her eye is obstructed with a strand of hair. While Kruger’s direct address language confronts us straight on, this woman who is shown in profile receives the audience’s stare instead of meeting its gaze. Is falling in love a passive action? Is love blind? Who is in control? Kruger’s works in the 1980s were key to theoretical discussions at the time concerning “the gaze” of the viewer and the subject of representation, which explored the dynamics and power structure of who is being looked at and who is doing the looking.

Over decades, Kruger has deployed her work across various spaces and forms, including public installations on buildings, billboards, buses, parks, and printed in newspapers. Her work has also become part of the larger consumer realm of merchandising via small-scale tactile objects like t-shirts, sweatshirts, posters and shopping bags, circulating her work beyond the gallery or museum and into everyday life. Kruger has also created architecturally immersive installations as well as multi-channel videos.

Barbara Kruger was born in 1945 in Newark, New Jersey, and studied at the School of Art at Syracuse University in 1964 and at the Parsons School of Design, New York in 1965. Kruger’s work has been the subject of numerous solo exhibitions at important museums internationally, including most recently at the Museum of Modern Art, New York (2022), Los Angeles County Museum of Art (2022), Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin (2022), The Art Institute of Chicago (2021), AMOREPACIFIC Museum of Art, Seoul (2019), National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC (2016), High Line Art, New York (2016), Modern Art Oxford (2014), Kunsthaus Bregenz, Austria (2013), Pinakothek der Moderne, Munich (2011), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2010), Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2008), Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2005), Whitney Museum of American Art, New York (2000), Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1999), Serpentine Gallery, London (1994), Musée d’art contemporain, Montreal (1985) and Kunsthalle Basel (1984). In 2005, Kruger was awarded the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale, where she was also commissioned to design the facade of Italy’s national pavilion. In 2019, the artist was awarded the Kaiserring prize from the city of Goslar, in Germany. Kruger’s work can be found in museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; The Broad, Los Angeles; Fonds régional d’art contemporain (FRAC) de Bourgogne, Dijon, France; Institute of Contemporary Arts, London; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Musée d’art moderne et d’art contemporain, Nice, France; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Saint Louis Art Museum, St. Louis; Seibu Museum of Art, Tokyo; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; and Tate, London; and Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, among others. The first institutional show of Kruger’s work in London in over twenty years, Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You. is currently on view at the Serpentine South Gallery through 17 March 2024. Kruger lives and works in Los Angeles and New York.

Hall Art Foundation
544 VT Route 106
Reading, VT 05062
United States
 

For more information and images, please contact the Foundation’s administrative office at info@hallartfoundation.org.