Exhibition Review: Barbara Kruger at Sprüth Magers
Barbara Kruger Untitled (Never Perfect Enough), 2020
Digital prints on vinyl, 3 parts
Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers
Written by Lia Jung
Copy Edited by Parker Renick
Photo Edited by Yanting Chen
Even if you have never heard of Barbara Kruger, you probably have seen her work. Her signature design, the iconic Futura Oblique font written in white inside a red textbox, is one of the most universally recognizable aesthetics of our time. It was the inspiration for the Supreme logo. It has been taken up by brands and corporations to be mass circulated for the everyday consumer. People have seen it on the subway, in shopping malls, and splayed across buildings and skyscrapers of their city. New York residents might remember having her design on their 2017 MetroCard. From postcards, keychains, tote bags, T-shirts, magazine clippings, and unauthorized photocopies inside students’ locker doors, Kruger’s art is everywhere in our visual culture.
Kruger developed her concise aesthetic in the early 1980s when she began to create paste-up arrangements: found photographs taken from mid-century American media sources, combined with bold, distinct phrases in red boxes. Fusing text and image, Kruger’s conceptual art creates a razor-sharp incision through the theoretical verbiage and superficial political messages, refashioning familiar aphorisms into a cultural critique that darkly mirrors our media-saturated society.
Barbara Kruger at the Sprüth Magers Gallery presents new and historic works by the artist, which clearly demonstrate how her work continues to shock and resonate with our experiences as contemporary subjects.
Barbara Kruger Installation view, Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, March 19–July 16, 2022
Photo: Robert Wedemeyer
Upon entrance, visitors to the gallery will be immediately confronted with Untitled (Never Perfect Enough) (2020), a triptych of nine-foot canvases in green, red, and blue iterations of a woman’s head. Shown here are different angles of the subject’s meticulously done blonde hair, pinned down in hairclips and rollers, with the words “NEVER,” “PERFECT,” and “ENOUGH” marked underneath each of the three images. The rollers are also overlaid with text such as “CHANGE” and “FEAR,” with arrows directing our gaze across each canvas.
Barbara Kruger Installation view, Sprüth Magers, Los Angeles, March 19–July 16, 2022
Photo: Robert Wedemeyer
When she makes us interpret these words, Kruger is not simply making a point about the beauty standards held against women; she is also obliquely calling attention to her own viewer’s tendency to use their gaze to categorize, judge, and control. Indeed, the woman in the pictures does not ever face us directly, underscoring the imbalance of the gaze being exchanged between viewer and subject.
“Your gaze hits the side of my face,” reproaches Kruger in a different piece dubbed Untitled (1982); the words of the phrase are arranged in a vertical stack, giving the message the appearance of a ransom note. The impersonal tone of the message is matched by the depersonalized face of the statue made of stone: what is being rejected here is familiarity with the female subject. Stone and women invoke ancient mythologies; in Untitled, it almost seems to allude to the biblical tale of Lot’s Wife in The Book of Genesis, who was turned into a pillar of salt for looking back at Sodom. But whereas Lot’s wife was punished for her looking, here it is the opposite condition of being looked at, which condemns our female subject. The bust, in the classical tradition where the neck disappears into a block of stone, further affirms this notion, as it suggests that women are rendered inert and objectified in the act of being looked at. Kruger prompts us to consider what is at stake for the female subject when they are consumed as an aesthetic product.
Barbara Kruger Untitled (Business as usual), 1987 Photograph and type on paper
Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers
At the back of the exhibit, there is a collection of twenty collages from the 1980s, including some of Kruger’s early and best-known works from her time as an editorial designer for Mademoiselle magazine. Iconic pieces such as Untitled (Business as usual) (1987) and Untitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989) display the artists’ way of composing images with text as a method of questioning the sort of language used in advertisements and political slogans. Untitled (1998) humorously puts the phrase “we don’t need another hero” underneath the picture showing a chubby man peeling a banana; the phallic connotations of the fruit, coupled with America’s obesity, is a clever deconstruction of the very idea of a “hero,” a rather pointed commentary in a country that overuses the term.
Barbara Kruger Untitled (Read My Lips), 1985
Photograph and type on paper
Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers
Frequently using direct address (“Your body …”; “You gaze…”), Kruger’s epigrams differ from other forms of reductionism and rhetorical forms found in other types of media, which strives to distract or lure with simple words. Rather than letting the art do the thinking for us, Kruger’s images provoke a response from their viewer and demand that we give some kind of assent or refusal to what is being said about us and to us. Looking at the close-cropped image from 1987 of a snarling canine mouth with the words “Business as usual” in the middle, it is almost as though Kruger anticipated her own ubiquity and how her images and ideas would be appropriated by the very market economy she is vindicating. Business as usual.
Barbara Kruger is on view at Sprüth Magers Los Angeles until July 16.
