Barbara Kruger

Barbara Kruger turned the visual language of magazines and advertising back against itself. Using found black-and-white images overlaid with blunt red-and-white text, she made works that confront power, identity, gender, and consumerism^*1. Pieces such as I Shop Therefore I Am and Your Body is a Battleground became defining works of the Pictures Generation and of feminist image critique^*2. Over time her practice expanded from framed works into installations that covered walls, floors, buses, and public spaces. Kruger showed that photography, text, design, and architecture could be fused into a single critical language^*5.