Photo By Gail
In the early 1980s, Sherrie Levine (b. 1947) began making copies of artworks by famous men and presenting them as her own. Exhibiting in downtown commercial galleries, Levine shocked audiences with her ‘theft.’ She questioned the authenticity, originality and value of the artworks and, like her peers Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, confronted the myth of the heroic male artist. Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Sherrie Levine, Large Check: 1 – 12
Photo By Gail
Barbara Kruger (b. 1945) addresses the media and politics in their native tongue: tabloid, sensational, authoritative, and direct. Kruger’s words and images merge the commercial and art worlds; their critical resonance eviscerates cultural hierarchies — everyone and everything is for sale.
Continue reading Modern Art Monday Presents: Barbara Kruger, Your Body is a Battleground
All Photos By Gail
Barbara Kruger is an American artist who works with pictures and words. Kruger uses the fluency she developed as a graphic designer to inform her work as an artist, insistently addressing the issues of power, property, money, race, and sexuality. Over the past three decades her work has ranged from the photographic merging of image and text, to immersive video installations, to room-wrapping textual exhibitions, to large-scale outdoor displays of words and images. Two of her best-known works – Your body is a battleground and I shop therefore I am – also showcase the feminist overtones of her artworks, and her concentration on women as a lucrative site for advertising and consumerism. Continue reading Barbara Kruger Mural at the High Line
Photographed By Gail at the Mary Boone Gallery on 24th Street in the Chelsea Gallery District
Commentary Below is Excerpted from Smithsonian Magazine‘s Barbara Kruger’s Artwork Speaks Truth to Power:
Even if you don’t know the name Barbara Kruger, you’ve probably seen her work in art galleries, on magazine covers or in giant installations that cover walls, billboards, buildings, buses, trains and tram lines all over the world. Kruger takes images from the mass media and pastes words over them, big, bold extracts of text — aphorisms, questions, slogans. Short machine-gun bursts of words that when isolated, and framed by Kruger’s gaze, linger in your mind, forcing you to think twice, thrice about clichés and catchphrases, introducing ironies into cultural idioms and the conventional wisdom they embed in our brains.
I Shop Therefore I Am, (1987), one of Kruger’s most famous works, makes a pointed critique of our consumer culture. Read more about the life and work of Barbara Kruger at the link above.
You Invest in the Divinity of The Masterpiece By Barbara Kruger (All Photos By Gail)
Contemporary Art Fans: here’s fun show that you won’t want to miss, and it’s only up for two more weeks, so act fast! Curator/Dealer Vito Schnabel (son of Artist and Film Director Julian Schnabel) and the Bruce High Quality Foundation (BHQF), an anonymous art collective focused on providing free art education through Bruce High Quality Foundation University (BHQFU), are currently hosting The Last Brucennial: a group show featuring the works of over 600 Known and Unknown Artists across a wide variety of mediums. Continue reading Must See Art: The Last Brucennial!