Barbara Kruger Takes Chicago
Powerful, Amazing And Forever Provocative
One of our favorite artists is taking over Chicago. Amazing and provocative American artist Barbara Kruger’s work is being shown at The Art Institute, in a major exhibition titled Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You. It is on view from September 19, 2021, through January 24, 2022, and it brings together a collection created throughout four decades.
This is one of the biggest exhibitions dedicated to Kruger in over twenty years, and she was highly involved in its development and design. Kruger, born in 1945, is a conceptual artist and collagist. She is known as one of the art world’s greatest critical observers, and a large part of her work consists of creating images with provocative texts which comment on popular culture and society (her most well-known works combine black and white images overlaid with red bands containing white letters in the Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed fonts.) Her style is highly recognizable and a key element of popular culture. It is also imitated and plagiarized by other artists and brands (the brand Supreme has been accused of plagiarizing Kruger’s work in its logo.) She is also known for working in a variety of mediums, including photography, sculpture, graphic design, architecture, video, and audio installations. She was associated with The Pictures Generation (1974-1984) and is still one of the most influential artists alive. She currently lives in New York and Los Angeles and is a Professor of New Genres at UCLA.
Kruger has played a major role in proving that art can carry important messages and have a colossal impact on society. As Robyn Farrell, Associate Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the Art Institute, states: “Kruger’s work is about media-making and making-meaning. She has deployed her images throughout the cultural systems of representation and the structures of power that contain and construct our daily lives. Here, she re-envisions the retrospective itself, by replaying her work in the present.”
“Kruger’s enduring subject is power as product, both in terms of the anonymous collective machinations of social control and its accumulation and abuse by singular worthies,” has stated James Rondeau, President and Eloise W. Martin Director of the Art Institute, “Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You. is, in Kruger’s words, an ‘anti-retrospective,’ an exhibition that pushes against the notion of a career as a relic or chronological checklist.” The exhibition extends past the museum’s interior walls and onto the exterior façades.
The show has been organized by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) and The Museum of Modern Art, New York. MoMA will also present a new, site-specific Kruger installation in its Donald and Catherine Marron Family Atrium. The display is in conjunction with the exhibition tour (on view July 18, 2022, to January 2, 2023.) The exhibition will open at LACMA on March 20, 2022, and runs through July 17, 2022.
