Barbara Kruger: Untitled (SmashUp)

In the mid-1960s Barbara Kruger studied graphic design at the Parsons School of Design in New York under artists Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel, who introduced her to the city’s underground fashion and photography scenes. Kruger left Parsons to work with Condé Nast Publications, where she quickly rose to the position of head designer at Mademoiselle magazine. She continued to work in publication design, art direction and picture editing for a decade.

In 1979, Kruger began to produce compositions that incorporated found images, which she sourced from commercial print media, with text collaged over top. Her design background is apparent in these stylized “photomontages,” in which the bold combination of text, image and colour subverts the images of advertising.

Kruger is considered a member of the Pictures Generation of artists, who throughout the 1980s recycled, mimicked and appropriated imagery from mass media and other everyday sources. These materials were transformed into critical commentary on consumerism and its role constructing identities linked to gender, class and race.

Kruger’s most recent series of site-specific installations carry forward her use of bold text and solid colour but dispense with images and photographic reprints altogether. Instead, the words play on the architecture of Kruger’s installation sites. Her billboard-size letters wind around walls, crawl up staircases, and inhabit niches, simultaneously erasing and enhancing the architecture. As we work through her installation we become participants in her interrogation of consumption and representation.