Personal study for art

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My chosen artist and why

The artist that I have chosen to look at is Barbara Kruger. I have chose to look at her work because I found her work very appealing and it inspired me more then any other artist that I have researched. The reason I think her work inspired is because most of her work consists of violence against women and I am very against this matter. Kruger expresses her views on this matter through text and photography in her art work. It’s like her aim is to show people how women are treated in this world. As I am a female myself I was attracted by her work and it made me want to research more in depth and create work in her style. She layers found photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and control that her captions speak to.

Most of her work includes text in black or white letters against a slash of red background, some of her instantly recognizable slogans read “I shop therefore I am,” and “Your body is a battleground." I think much of her text questions the viewer about feminism, classicism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, although her black-and-white images are culled from the mainstream magazines that sell the very ideas she is disputing.

Here is a few of Kruger’s works attached together. It shows a view of what her work is about. She uses words such as “hate”, “body” “battleground”, and “world”. These are big words, and have strong meanings. This shows that the message she is trying to get out to people is also big, strong and has a lot of meaning.

Her works are direct and evoke an immediate response. Usually her style involves the cropping of a magazine or newspaper image enlarged in black and white. The enlargement of the image is done as crudely as possible to monumental proportions. A message is stenciled on the image, usually in white letters against a background of red. The text and image are unrelated in an effort to create anxiety by the audience that plays on the fears of society.

Barbara Kruger’s works has appeared in museums and galleries worldwide, her work has appeared on billboards, buscards, posters, a public park, a train station platform in Strasbourg, France, and in other public commissions.

About the Artist 

Born in Newark, New Jersey, in 1945, Barbara Kruger grew up in a working-class family. After graduating from high school, she spent a year at Syracuse University. The death of her father brought her to New York City, where she studied photography and graphic design at the Parsons School of Design. Kruger accepted a position at Condé Nast Publications designing ads for Mademoiselle magazine, where she was eventually promoted to chief designer. In the 1970s, Kruger decided to resume making art. Drawn to the work of Magdalena Abakanowicz, she produced fabric wall hangings. After experimenting with painting for a time, she began juxtaposing photographs with text, a method that allowed her to apply her knowledge of graphic design. Kruger’s text-and-image works have appeared in various forms, such as billboards, posters, and even matchbooks and tote bags.

Kruger makes her works from images she finds in the popular media, not unlike how other artists use found objects, notably Tony Cragg, and Jeff Koons. She notes that her work as a graphic designer for a magazine influenced her choice of images: “If you didn’t make people look at that page you were fired.” Once she selects the pictures she attempts to match them with phrases, drawing inspiration from lists of phrases she compiles, favorite books, and the thesaurus.

After choosing a phrase to use with the image, Kruger makes Photostats of the pictures, manipulating the size, framing, and contrast so that the images can be re photographed. During the layout process, she arranges the type faced words with the images. Next she sends them to a photographic studio, which enlarges the designs to the size she specifies and prints the photographs in either black and white or color. Finally, the works are fitted into red enamel frames.

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Kruger adopted a format that is deceptively simple (photograph, text, and frame) to convey a powerful message about relationships in society. The artist has said about her work: “Basically I want to be effective in making changes in power relations, in social relations. . . The spectators who view my work don’t have to understand [art history]. They just have to consider the pictures that bombard their lives and tell them who they are to some extent. That’s all they have to understand.”

Appendix  

Barbara kruger’s work sends out the message on violence against women. Although her work ...

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