Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945, Barbara Kruger began her career as an editorial designer, followed by a picture editor at Condè Nast Publications. She started making art in the early 1970s and gradually developed her unmistakable and unique formal language using a powerful combination of image and text.
Since the mid 1990s, Barbara Kruger has diversified her practice and embraced a series of aesthetic expansions which includes working with film and audio installations. This progression into large-scale immersive installations is fuelled by the artist’s longstanding interest in architecture and desire to address the viewer directly within whole environments.
Barbara Kruger lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. She was awarded The Golden Lion for Lifetime Achievement at the 51st Venice Biennale in 2005 and currently teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). Solo shows include the Institute of Contemporary Art, London, 1983, Kunsthalle Basel, 1984, the Musée d’art contemporain de Montreal, 1985, the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf, 1986, the Serpentine Gallery, London, 1994, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, 1999, the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, 2000, and the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, 2010-2011. Group shows include Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, 1987, Centre Pompidou, Paris, 1988, Tate Liverpool, 2002, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, 2004, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 2006, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York, 2007. Upcoming group shows include That’s the Way We Do It: The Techniques and Aesthetic of Appropriation at the Kunsthaus Bregenz from April 16 to July 3, 2011.
Courtesy Sprüth Magers

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