Exhibition dates: 30th September 2016 – 22nd January 2017
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945)
Untitled (Know nothing, Believe anything, Forget everything)
1987/2014
Screenprint on vinyl
Overall: 274.32 x 342.05cm (108 x 134 11/16 in.)
National Gallery of Art, Washington, Gift of the Collectors Committee, Sharon and John D. Rockefeller IV, Howard and Roberta Ahmanson, Denise and Andrew Saul, Lenore S. and Bernard A. Greenberg Fund, Agnes Gund, and Michelle Smith
© Barbara Kruger
Now this is how you tell a tale using contemporary photography!
Succinct, psychological sound bites that are commentaries on cultural production, that leave the viewer troubled by the enigma of their pronunciation. They are focused around the construct of the viewer and the subject of representation while also probing matters of identity in contemporary culture.
“They present Kruger’s distinctive direct-address texts (using active verbs and personal pronouns) which confront the viewer head-on and contrast with the underlying images of (often passive, often female) figures looking off the picture plane, and receiving the viewer’s attention. This tension creates conceptual works of great visual power.”
Know nothing, Believe anything, Forget everything!
Dr Marcus Bunyan
Many thankx to the National Gallery of Art for allowing me to publish the photographs in the posting. Please click on the photographs for a larger version of the image.
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945)
Untitled (We don’t need another hero)
1987
Photograph and type on paper
Overall: 14.61 x 28.89cm (5 3/4 x 11 3/8 in.)
Framed: 34.61 x 48.58 x 4.45cm (13 5/8 x 19 1/8 x 1 3/4 in.)
Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland
© Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945)
Untitled (We don’t need another hero)
1987
Silkscreen on vinyl
Overall: 276.54 x 531.34 x 6.35cm (108 7/8 x 209 3/16 x 2 1/2 in.)
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Gift from the Emily Fisher Landau Collection
© Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945)
Untitled (Love is something you fall into)
1990
Photographic silkscreen/vinyl
Overall: 163.83 x 396.24cm (64 1/2 x 156 in.)
Hall Collection
© Barbara Kruger. Photo courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945)
Untitled (A picture is worth more than a thousand words)
1992
Silkscreen on vinyl
Overall: 208.28 x 312.42cm (82 x 123 in.)
Private collection
© Barbara Kruger
The striking works of Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945) will be featured in a focused exhibition at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, timed to celebrate the newly renovated East Building galleries. On view September 30, 2016 through January 22, 2017, In the Tower: Barbara Kruger is the first exhibition in the Tower Gallery in three years, renewing the series devoted to the presentation of works by leading contemporary artists. The exhibition presents 15 of Kruger’s profile works – images of the figure in profile over which the artist has layered her attention-grabbing phrases and figures of speech – from the early 1980s to the present, varying in scale from magazine-size to monumental.
Inspired by the Gallery’s recent acquisition of Kruger’s Untitled (Know nothing, Believe anything, Forget everything) (1987-2014), the exhibition centres on the artist’s profile works, among her strongest commentaries on cultural production. They present Kruger’s distinctive direct-address texts (using active verbs and personal pronouns) which confront the viewer head-on and contrast with the underlying images of (often passive, often female) figures looking off the picture plane, and receiving the viewer’s attention. This tension creates conceptual works of great visual power.
Kruger’s works are by turns so strong, shocking, or humorous that they grab the viewer’s attention. This is due to her signature style which includes pronouncements printed in white Futura Bold typeface across red bands reminiscent of the Life and Look magazine banners from the golden age of picture magazines. Kruger’s text slashes the black-and-white images beneath, effectively shattering the clichés represented in both words and images. Using the language, colour, image, and scale derived from the media-saturated world she queries, Kruger’s work illuminates and interrupts media tropes to encourage an active visual readership.
“Barbara Kruger’s profile works count among her most iconic images,” said Earl A. Powell III, director, National Gallery of Art, Washington. “We are delighted to present to our visitors from around the world this exhibition featuring such an outstanding artist.”
Exhibition highlights
Among the key works on view will be Kruger’s Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face), (1983), that served as inspiration for Craig Owens’s 1983 essay, “The Medusa Effect, or The Specular Ruse.” At the time they were made, Kruger’s 1980s works powerfully engaged and promoted theoretical discussion of “the gaze” around the construct of the viewer and the subject of representation. More broadly, these works resound with the use of the profile in the genre of portraiture in the long arc of history, while also probing matters of identity in contemporary philosophy. For this work and others, the exhibition will present Kruger’s original paste-ups to illuminate the artist’s process.
Untitled (Know nothing, Believe anything, Forget everything) (1987-2014), acquired for the Gallery by the Collectors Committee and a group of generous patrons, offers an image of a woman in profile, lying prostrate and receiving medical treatment to her eye through a large, funnel-like device. Over the image are three red bands with the artist’s admonitions emblazoned in white text that warn against the pleasures and perils of our “truthy” photography-based mass media and the knowledge, beliefs, and memories that it imparts.
A new five-minute film will feature excerpts from an interview with the artist discussing works in the exhibition. Made possible by the H.R.H. Foundation, the film will play continuously in the anteroom of the Tower Gallery.
Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) short biography
Kruger’s higher education began at Syracuse University and continued at Parson’s School of Art and Design in New York, where she studied with Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel in 1966. Beginning in 1967 Kruger worked as a layout editor at Condé Nast for twelve years, including posts at Mademoiselle, House and Garden, and Aperture. In 1969 Kruger began to make her own art while also writing poetry and film and television reviews. A decade later she had developed her “picture practice” with photographs repurposed from 1940s-1970s manuals and magazines that she overlaid with her own texts or those repurposed from the media. The completed works alter her found materials, inscribing her admonitions and questions over the images to stimulate and rouse the viewer from the passivity of acceptance.
Kruger’s background in design is evident in these works, for which she is internationally renowned. Owing to her interest in the public arena and the vernacular, Kruger’s work has appeared on billboards, bus cards, posters, T-shirts, matchbook covers, in public parks, and on train station platforms. Recent work has included immersive installations of room-wrapping images and text, and multiple-channel videos.
Prior to teaching at UCLA, Kruger taught at California Institute of the Arts, the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, and the University of California, Berkeley. In 2005 Kruger received the Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale. Her work was featured in the Whitney Biennial in 1973, 1983, 1985, and 1987; the Venice Biennale in 1982, 1993, and 2005; and Documenta 8 in 1987. Notable solo exhibitions include P.S. 1, Long Island City, New York (1980); Institute of Contemporary Art, London (1983); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1985); Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles (1999, traveled to Whitney Museum of American Art in 2000); South London Gallery (2001); Gallery of Modern Art, Glasgow (2005); the Moderna Museet, Stockholm (2008); the Museum Of Modern Art, Oxford (2014), and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden (2012–2016). Kruger lives and works in Los Angeles and New York City.”
Press release from the National Gallery of Art
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945)
Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face)
1981
Photograph and type on paper
Overall: 23.8 x 17.8cm (9 3/8 x 7 in.)
Framed: 47.94 x 39.05 x 4.45cm (18 7/8 x 15 3/8 x 1 3/4 in.)
Glenstone Museum, Potomac, Maryland
© Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945)
Untitled (You thrive on mistaken identity)
1981
Gelatin silver print
Overall: 152.4 x 101.6cm (60 x 40 in.)
Matthias Brunner
© Barbara Kruger. Photo courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945)
Untitled (We have received orders not to move)
1982
Photographic collage
Overall: 177.17 x 120.65cm (69 3/4 x 47 1/2 in.)
Susan Bay-Nimoy and Leonard Nimoy
Courtesy: Mary Boone Gallery, New York
© Barbara Kruger
Photo: courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945)
Untitled (Your creation is divine, Our reproduction is human)
1984
Gelatin silver print
Overall: 182.88 x 121.92cm (72 x 48 in.)
Phyllis and William Mack
© Barbara Kruger
Photo: courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945)
Untitled (The future belongs to those who can see it)
1997
Silkscreen on vinyl
Overall: 215.9 x 152.4cm (85 x 60 in.)
From the Chris and Dori Carter Collection
© Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger (American, b. 1945)
Untitled (Think of me thinking of you)
2013
Digital print on vinyl
Overall: 243.84 x 191.77cm (96 x 75 1/2 in.)
Private collection
© Barbara Kruger
Photo: courtesy Mary Boone Gallery, New York
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