Bilbao,
With a trajectory of more than five decades behind him, Barbara Kruger is the author of an easily recognizable work and marked by the use of bold typefaces, white, black and red tones and dramatic juxtapositions of text and image. Its objective is to analyze the machinations of power in relation to today’s popular culture by resorting to the visual strategies of mass communication and advertising language, the same for which we access the contents that it puts in question.
It has as its starting point its production the observation of the stereotypes that are within the social processes of integration or exclusion, as well as those of domination or authority, and is deployed in extended, cut and combined photographs, accompanied by phrases that resume common places of the general conversation.
Companion in her formation as Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel, has made consumerism, capitalism and women the fundamental axes of her studies, since her first works as an advertising designer for Conde Nast or the Mademoiselle Gazette. Her creations use the classic compositional procedures of the images, but in those “traditional frames” she introduces a high critical burden, a sarcastic conceptual discourse around our collective behaviors: the form is only a tool for the transmission of a deep message that must lead to the self -signing.
For Kruger, the company is controlled by the codes dictated by the media, to the point that the experiences lived, sometimes, are reduced to the imitation of those clichés settled in our memory.
On June 24, and in collaboration with the author, the Guggenheim Bilbao Museum will open what is her first exhaustive anthological in Spain, “Another Day Disco Night Night”, curated by Lekha Hileman Waitoller. The architecture of the rooms of the Gehry building will host its sound and textual proposals, which will wrap the viewer in an alleged encounter with assumed beliefs and for it challenged.
They will arrive in Bilbao from early works (including their famous Paste-ups) To recent digital pieces and videos, which nourish both a good number of communicative sources – advertising desk, religious doctrines, political speeches, internet comments – and of their personal thoughts about those current control systems. Reviewing, therefore, milestones of his career, we will verify that the juxtaposition of images and words and the resource to monumentality in the dimensions have been, in their hands, very valid options to critically address the flow of data that reach us through the media, explicitly or subliminally.
The employment, where appropriate, of advertising language mechanisms is due to its intention to subvert them and to call our attention to these paths of persuasion and surveillance that usually go unnoticed. Already during his mentioned stage as a graphic designer in the late sixties, Kruger learned that compositional clarity and intelligent use of visual information could be very effective to capture attention.
It was at that time, also, when the artist’s sensitivity was consolidated towards the drifts of the dissemination of images in the consumer society and their potential capacity and influence: then, typefaces such as the Ultra Compressed Helvetica either Future bold They began to become their hallmarks, because they generated impact, they were easy to read and because they allowed him to strip a visual paraphernalia that did not interest him. Language for her is both form and content, and provides as many keys as any photograph.
The tour will open with a well -known project: No title (I Shop therefore i am)which devised in 1987 as photographic screen printing on vinyl but that reimagined in 2019 as a LED installation with sound and animation; This latest version is the one that will reach Guggenheim. Its title is one of the many variations it will offer: then they will arrive I buy, then accumulate; I need, then I buy; I love, then I need… and other propositions of Cartesian inspiration in which consumption and identity are intertwined.
Other tensions of contemporaneity not linked to materialism will be present in works such as Without title (Forever)which collects in black and white a gloomy prediction of Orwell, that we could imagine the future as a boot ends incessantly a human face. Or in Title (Truth)in which that last word goes from black to gray, leading us to discuss whether its concept is indelible or can erode over time. They will contrast with this type of work, forceful in their background and groups in their involvement, sound formulas of intimate channel: I love you, I’m sorry.
As a wink to Basque culture, and connecting with its usual study of language as a powerful force that defines us and in which there are no hierarchies, but peculiarities, Kruger has specifically conceived for this occasion a proposal in Basque and Spanish: Without title (road)dated this year. It will connect the various exhibition halls with the Guggenheim atrium, referring to the Bilbao linguistic landscape.
In sum, in the face of visual (and rhetorical, and persuasive) saturation and in the face of the objective truth, the New Jersey artist continues to paddle in favor of thought and slowness. He tells us in large letters.
“Barbara Kruger. Another Day. Another Night”
Guggenheim Museum Bilbao
Avenida Abandoibarra, 2
Bilbao
From June 24 to November 9, 2025
