Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger was born in 1945 in Newark, New Jersey, and lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. She studied at Syracuse University from 1964 to 1965 and at the Parsons School of Design before spending the 1960s and 1970s working as a graphic designer and art director — a professional formation that would prove foundational to her artistic practice. She began exhibiting as an artist in the early 1970s, and in 1980 received the PS1 grant from PS1 in New York, an early institutional recognition of her emerging work.

Kruger's practice is built on the collision of photographic imagery and declarative text, a strategy she developed through photographic silkscreens on vinyl that borrow the visual grammar of advertising and mass media to interrogate power, identity, gender, and consumer culture. Works such as Untitled (You are not yourself) (1981), Untitled (You invest in the divinity of the masterpiece) (1982), Untitled (I shop therefore I am) (1987), and Untitled (We don't need another hero) (1986) established the compressed, confrontational language for which she became internationally recognized. Her 1989 photographic silkscreen Untitled (Your body is a battleground) — created for the pro-choice Women's March in Washington, D.C. — divides a woman's face into positive and negative photographic fields overlaid with its titular phrase, turning an advertising-like format into a direct statement about reproductive politics and control, and remains among the most iconic works of feminist visual culture. Over subsequent decades, Kruger expanded from the autonomous panel toward immersive architectural environments: Untitled (Questions) (1990) transformed accumulated text into an enveloping installation, while Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You. (2021), presented at the Art Institute of Chicago and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, extended her photomontage vocabulary into moving text and architectural space, examining truth, belief, and the unstable relationship between speaker and viewer. Untitled (Shafted) (2025), a large-scale installation at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, demonstrates the continued evolution of her practice in scale and political engagement.

Kruger has been represented by Sprüth Magers — across its Berlin, London, Los Angeles, and New York spaces — since 1985, initially through Galerie Monika Sprüth, and has a historic association with Mary Boone Gallery, New York. Her exhibition record in recent years reflects sustained international institutional attention: solo presentations at Glenstone in Potomac (2023), ARoS Aarhus (2024), Serpentine South in London (2024), and the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2025) — where the exhibition Barbara Kruger: Another day. Another night. runs through November 9, 2025 — are followed by Barbara Kruger: The History of Tears at the Bourse de Commerce–Pinault Collection in Paris and a major exhibition at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center in Athens, both in 2026. Her work has been reviewed extensively in publications including Frieze, Beaux Arts Magazine, Le Journal des Arts, Aesthetica Magazine, and Musée Magazine.