Born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945, Barbara Kruger began to study design at Syracuse University in 1965 and, subsequently, at the School of Visual Arts before she enrolled at the Parson’s School of Design in New York to continue her studies with the photographer Diane Arbus and others in 1966. After studying, she first worked as an editorial graphic designer and later as a picture editor for Condé Nast Publications in the 1970s - for the American fashion magazine “Mademoiselle” and the magazine “House and Garden”, for example. These professional experiences informed her idiom as an artist. She deliberately appropriated the strategies of advertising to subversively employ them against it. In the 1980s, she made a name for herself internationally with works in which she combined black-and-white photographs from the mass media with poignant, partly aggressive textual messages: short statements, open questions, and concrete requests.

Text-image news like “We don’t need another hero,” subtle statements such as “It’s a small world but not if you have to clean it,” or explicitly political statements like “If you are beaten If you are hurt If you need help GET OUT” and “Your body is a battleground” exemplify her approach. They also illustrate the character of Kruger’s interventions in feminist, political, and class-theoretical discussions and her critical approach to today’s consumerist world. Kruger develops her works not only for museums, but frequently conceives them for public space, preferring advertising spaces on buses, advertising columns and lightboxes, or large billboards. On the occasion of the Schirn exhibition “Shopping. A Century of Art and Consumer Culture” in 2002, she covered the entire façade of the Galeria Kaufhof on the Zeil in Frankfurt, Germany’s shopping mile with the biggest turnover, with a 2,200 square-meter work: two gigantic pairs of eyes watched the people in a buying mood. The inscription above the eyes read: “DU WILLST ES, DU KAUFST ES, DU VERGISST ES” (YOU WANT IT, YOU BUY IT, YOU FORGET IT). With this installation, Kruger picked up the thread of her central work “I shop therefore I am” from 1987 on a monumental scale.