Barbara Kruger

18 quotes

Biography

Barbara Kruger is an American conceptual artist and collagist associated with the Pictures Generation. She is most known for her visual word art that consists of black-and-white photographs, overlaid with declarative captions, stated in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed text.

"When I hear the word Culture I take out my checkbook"

Barbara Kruger

"If you can’t feel it, it must be real."

Barbara Kruger

"Memory is your image of perfection."

Barbara Kruger

"Architecture is my first love, if you want to talk about what moves me — the ordering of space, the visual pleasure, architecture's power to construct our days and nights."

Barbara Kruger

"I have no complaints, except for the world."

Barbara Kruger

"What a ridiculous clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers."

Barbara Kruger

"Prominence is cool, but when the delusion kicks in it can be a drag. Especially if you choose to surround yourself with friends and not acolytes."

Barbara Kruger

"Although my art work was heavily informed by my design work on a formal and visual level, as regards meaning and content the two practices parted ways."

Barbara Kruger

"All the gossip and craziness becomes a kind of sustained narrative which, in turn, can become history. It's scary."

Barbara Kruger

"I'd always been a news junkie, always read lots of newspapers and watched the Sunday morning news shows on TV and felt strongly about issues of power, control, sexuality and race."

Barbara Kruger

"I try to deal with the complexities of power and social life, but as far as the visual presentation goes I purposely avoid a high degree of difficulty."

Barbara Kruger

"What makes the production of my work so expensive? The whole installation thing - the construction, the objects, the technology. It really adds up."

Barbara Kruger

"I want people to be drawn into the space of the work. And a lot of people are like me in that they have relatively short attention spans. So I shoot for the window of opportunity."

Barbara Kruger

"I mean, making art is about objectifying your experience of the world, transforming the flow of moments into something visual, or textual, or musical, whatever. Art creates a kind of commentary."

Barbara Kruger

"I think what I'm trying to do is create moments of recognition. To try to detonate some kind of feeling or understanding of lived experience."

Barbara Kruger

"I think that art is still a site for resistance and for the telling of various stories, for validating certain subjectivities we normally overlook. I'm trying to be affective, to suggest changes, and to resist what I feel are the tyrannies of social life on a certain level."

Barbara Kruger

"Seeing is no longer believing. The very notion of truth has been put into crisis. In a world bloated with images, we are finally learning that photographs do indeed lie."

Barbara Kruger

"Even when I was a little girl, I remember going to the Museum of Modern Art. I think my parents took me there once or twice. And what I really remember is the design collection."

Barbara Kruger