Barbara Kruger

Five decades of iconic and incisive art from Barbara Kruger Since the mid-1970s, Barbara Kruger (born 1945) has been interrogating consumer culture in works that often combine visual and written language. In her singular graphic style, Kruger probes aspects of identity, desire and consumerism that are embedded in our everyday lives. This volume traces her continuously evolving practice to reveal how she adapts her work in accordance with the moment, site and context. The book features a range of striking images--from her analogue paste-ups of the 1980s to digital productions of the last two decades, including new works produced on the occasion of the exhibition. Also featured are singular works in vinyl, her large-scale room wraps, multichannel videos, site-specific installations and commissioned works. The book also showcases how Kruger's site-specific works have been reconceived for each venue, and includes a section of reprinted texts selected by the artist. Renowned for her use of direct address and her engagement with contemporary culture, Kruger is one of the most incisive and courageous artists working today. This volume explores how her pictures and words remain urgently resonant in a rapidly changing 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 fully illustrated catalogue is published on the occasion of the exhibition by internationally acclaimed artist Barbara Kruger at Modern Art Oxford, 28th June - 31st August 2014.Kruger created a major site-specific text installation in Modern Art Oxford's iconic Upper Gallery, as well as exhibiting a number of her celebrated 'paste-ups' from the 1980s, and an immersive four screen video installation.Employing a variety of means from film and collage to text and public installations, Kruger's practice adopts the visual devices of mass media in order to subvert the messaging which advertising, film and online media perpetuate, thereby deconstructing the strategies of power at work in our world today.The publication includes an analysis of her work by Tim Williamson, the Professor of Logic at Oxford University.

Now See Hear! has been assembled around the central rubric of translation, and essays address translations between art, language, advertising, television, graphic design, comics, video, film, history, art-history, signs and symbols, landscape and architecture, within the context of the current conditions of the market place.

A leading critic’s inside story of “the photo boom” during the crucial decades of the 1970s and 80s When Andy Grundberg landed in New York in the early 1970s as a budding writer, photography was at the margins of the contemporary art world. By 1991, when he left his post as critic for the New York Times, photography was at the vital center of artistic debate. Grundberg writes eloquently and authoritatively about photography’s “boom years,” chronicling the medium’s increasing role within the most important art movements of the time, from Earth Art and Conceptual Art to performance and video. He also traces photography’s embrace by museums and galleries, as well as its politicization in the culture wars of the 80s and 90s. Grundberg reflects on the landmark exhibitions that defined the moment and his encounters with the work of leading photographers—many of whom he knew personally—including Gordon Matta-Clark, Cindy Sherman, and Robert Mapplethorpe. He navigates crucial themes such as photography’s relationship to theory as well as feminism and artists of color. Part memoir and part history, this perspective by one of the period’s leading critics ultimately tells a larger story about the crucial decades of the 70s and 80s through the medium of photography.

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.

Volume covers the Collection of Prints and Illustrated Books, not the collection of artists' books.