Celebrates the career and work of Barbara Kruger, focusing on her exploitation of social-psychological messages embedded in popular culture through the integration of photography and text in installation pieces around the world.

Barbara Kruger is a talking viewer with a hit-and-run attitude. Her vivid commentary on TV and film will galvanize even the most jaded with its social clarity and its savvy sense of cultural justice.

This is the most comprehensive publication ever produced on the work of American artist Barbara Kruger. Kruger, one of the most influential artists of the last three decades, uses pictures and words through a wide variety of media and sites to raise issues of power, sexuality, and representation. Her works include photographic prints on paper and vinyl, etched metal plates, sculpture, video, installations, billboards, posters, magazine and book covers, T-shirts, shopping bags, postcards, and newspaper op-ed pieces. This book serves as the catalog for the first major one-person exhibition of Kruger's work to be mounted in the United States. The book, designed by Lorraine Wild in collaboration with the artist, contains texts by Rosalyn Deutsche, Katherine Dieckmann, Ann Goldstein, Steven Heller, Gary Indiana, Carol Squiers, and Lynne Tillman on subjects associated with Kruger's work, including photography, graphic design, public space, power, and representation, as well as an extensive exhibition history, bibliography, and checklist of the exhibition. The cover features a new piece by Kruger, entitled Thinking of You,created especially for the catalog. The exhibition was organized by Ann Goldstein, curator at The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Copublished with The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. EXHIBITION SCHEDULE: Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles October 17, 1999-February 13, 2000 Whitney Museum of American Art New York City July 13-October 22, 2000

"A seminal volume celebrating the career of influential American artist Barbara Kruger, made in collaboration with the artist. Bold, philosophical, radical, subversive: the art of Barbara Kruger focuses on decoding the social-psychological messages embedded in popular culture. Marrying pictures to words in a variety of media and sites, Kruger raises issues of power politics, sexuality, and representation. Borrowing slogans and phrases from the lexicon of thought, and using the potent weapon of pure graphics, Kruger’s art offers up powerfully distilled messages of word and image. This beautifully designed book is the most comprehensive volume on Kruger’s body of work to date. The book explores her work over the past thirty years, including many previously unpublished works. Aptly designed to embody a manifesto-like aesthetic, the book also presents bold spreads of the artist’s large-scale works and public projects, which confront such controversial and weighty topics as abortion, consumerism, spirituality, and identity."--Amazon.com viewed Jan. 22. 2024.

Text by Veit Gorner, Frank-Thorsten Moll, Hilke Wagner.