Barbara Kruger

(Born January 26, 1945) is an American conceptual artist. Much of her work consists of black-and-white photographs overlaid with declarative captions Kruger juxtaposes her imagery and text containing criticism of sexism and the circulation of power within cultures is a recurring motif in Kruger's work. She has said; "I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are and who we arent." A larger category that threads through her work is the appropriation and alteration of existing images. The importance of appropriation art in contemporary culture lay in its ability to play with preponderant imagistic and textual conventions: to mash up meanings and create new ones. Kruger's early monochrome pre-digital works, known as paste ups, reveal the influence of the artists experience as a magazine editorial designer during her early career. These small scale works, the largest of which is 11 x 13 inches, are composed of altered found images, and texts either culled from the media or invented by the artist. A negative of each work was then produced and used to make enlarged versions of these initial paste ups. Since the mid 1990s, Kruger has created large-scale immersive video and audio installations. Enveloping the viewer with the seductions of direct address, the work continues her questioning of power, control, affection and contempt: still images now move and speak and spatialize their commentary. Much of Kruger's work engages the merging of found photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to. In their trademark white letters against a slash of red background, some of her instantly recognizable slogans read I shop therefore I am, (Picture 1.) and Your body is a battleground" (Picture 2.).

Much of her text questions the viewer about feminism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, although her black-and-white images are culled from the mainstream magazines that sell the very ideas she is disputing.