Essay About Barbara Kruger And True Intent Of Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger
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Barbara Kruger
Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945. She studied at
Syracuse University, Parsons School of Design, and the School of Visual Arts in
New York and has exhibited all over the world.
She has worked from having a design job at “Mademoiselle Magazine”, soon
becoming the head designer. Later working as a graphic designer, art director,
and picture editor in the art departments at “House and Garden”, “Aperture”
and other publications. This greatly influenced her work as an artist.
Barbara Kruger has a very unique style when it comes to her artwork, her
background in design is the reason she is so well known. Her artwork comes off
very moving and strong but also very simple. She achieves this look by mainly
using the colours red, black and white, while adding and manipulating images
and words to promote strong emotions dealing with crisis, disasters, and people.
Her main topics she chooses to express threw her art is supporting legal
abortion and fighting domestic violence, also womens supporting role in
society.
To describe the true intent of Barbara Krugers art a women named Juliana
Engberg said it perfectly “Barbara Krugers on going project is to provoke
questions about power and its effect on the human condition: to investigate the
way power is constructed, used and abused. In her works, which have become
the demonstrative visual icons of the 1980s and 1990s, power is interrogated
and interpreted through the social, economic and political arrangements which
motor the life impulses of love, hate, sex and death.”
To achieve this look Barbara makes a strong background full of photographs
from already existing products such as magazines, articles, postcards,
billboards etc. and organizes them sometimes copying the image over and over
again, duplicating, mixing with other images or using just the one. Then she
adds very expressive and aggressive text. She adds this text to try and involve
her viewers in the struggle for power and control. She makes this text pop out by
making them big and black (sometimes white) with a slash of red for the
background. Some examples of quotations she uses are “I shop therefore I am”
and “Your body is a battleground”. Most of here texts also consist of feminism
and classicism.
Barbaras pieces of art consist of photographic silkscreen/vinyl. Some of her
pieces of art range in size from an average poster to scaling the walls of giant
buildings. Some examples of sizes are 82″ x 123″ or 109″ x 109″.
You can find her artwork almost everywhere, for example on billboards around
the world, magazines, t-shirts, shopping bags, matchboxes, and television.
Places Barbara Kruger has had solo exhibitions are:
The Museum Of Contemporary Art (1999)(Los Angeles)
Mary Boone Gallery (1987,1989,1991,1994)(New York)
Centre National dArt Contemporian (1992)(Grenoble, France)
Kolnischer