Few contemporary artists are as recognizable, or as imitated, as Barbara Kruger.
The American artist (1945—), who first rose to fame in the 1980s with artworks that pilfered the language of advertising to broadcast more abstract issues of power, enjoys the rare status of corporate brands imitating her iconic pieces. Supreme, an American streetwear brand, has famously co-opted her red box-white font style, using the same unique typography to sell merchandise in a strange inversion of the artist’s comments on capitalism and consumerism.
SEE ALSO: A Review of Jean Butler’s New Ode to Irish Dance
What her original artworks mean today—endure as they do—is an evident preoccupation in “Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You,” a showcase of recent pieces on view at Serpentine South, London. (The show toured parts of the U.S. in 2022 and 2023 in a similar form.) It’s the first show in almost twenty years Kruger has appeared in the U.K., with her last solo institutional show at the same gallery in 1994.
“I really wanted it to look forward, look back, and be in the present,” Kruger says in an interview with gallery curator Hans Ulrich Obrist. “The fact that certain works of mine became ‘iconic’ made me want to revisit the original meanings of those works and how they could be changed, altered and re-thought.”
The exhibition features reimagined and digitized versions of memorable creations, including Untitled (I shop therefore I am) (1987/2019) and Untitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989/2019), which first brought Kruger widespread cultural recognition. Both works were interested in advancing political issues like conspicuous consumption and feminist thought, taking pithy phrases and making them ironic mottos. Each new idiom was then displayed against black-and-white photographs lifted from magazines and newspapers.
Nowadays, Kruger has updated her visual style for the TikTok age—even creating a........