Barbara Kruger Untitled (Free Love) 1988 Photograph in artist’s frame. 87 1/2 x 51 1/2 in. (222.3 x 130.8 cm).
Provenance Mary Boone Gallery, New York Literature V. Combalia, “Invasion de Europeons” El Pais, March 6, 1989, p. 9 (illustrated); K. Linker, Love for Sale – The Words and pictures of Barbara Kruger New York, 1990, p. 59 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay During the 1980s, Kruger mastered a style of conceptual work that consisted of enlarged black and white photographs taken from mid-21st Century American print-media juxtaposed with Futura bold typeface captions.These paintings create interesting associations between image and text, which border on societal criticism and play on the general fears of society with regards to racial, religious, sexual, and gender stereotypes. If Kruger is a spokeswoman for feminism, she is also its barometer, for beginning in the early 1980s her work registers a profound change within the women’s movement. At this time in the United States, and several years earlier in Europe, a specific branch of feminism began to express dissatisfaction with the equal-rights strategies that infused cultural politics in the 1970s. At issue was the failure of these strategies – based on eliminating discrimination and establishing equal access to institutional power – to disturb the ideological structures of which discrimination is symptomatic; attention was focused on their rigid and deterministic definition of sexuality as “natural,” pregiven, or biological. Among Kruger’s generation, gender was not regarded as an innate or “essential” condition, but rather as a construction produced through representation. Sexuality was regarded as the result of signification and semiotic effects, rather than of biology—a perspective that offers the possibility of changing our restrictive definitions of gender. Masculinity and femininity came to be seen as the products of adaptation to social standards of sexuality, in which the impact of signs play a determining role. In a manner with radical implications for the visual arts, discussions converged on the politics of the image.K. Linker, Love for Sale – The Words and Pictures of Barbara Kruger New York, 1990, p. 59 Read More
Barbara Kruger Untitled (Free Love) 1988 Photograph in artist’s frame. 87 1/2 x 51 1/2 in. (222.3 x 130.8 cm).
Provenance Mary Boone Gallery, New York Literature V. Combalia, “Invasion de Europeons” El Pais, March 6, 1989, p. 9 (illustrated); K. Linker, Love for Sale – The Words and pictures of Barbara Kruger New York, 1990, p. 59 (illustrated) Catalogue Essay During the 1980s, Kruger mastered a style of conceptual work that consisted of enlarged black and white photographs taken from mid-21st Century American print-media juxtaposed with Futura bold typeface captions.These paintings create interesting associations between image and text, which border on societal criticism and play on the general fears of society with regards to racial, religious, sexual, and gender stereotypes. If Kruger is a spokeswoman for feminism, she is also its barometer, for beginning in the early 1980s her work registers a profound change within the women’s movement. At this time in the United States, and several years earlier in Europe, a specific branch of feminism began to express dissatisfaction with the equal-rights strategies that infused cultural politics in the 1970s. At issue was the failure of these strategies – based on eliminating discrimination and establishing equal access to institutional power – to disturb the ideological structures of which discrimination is symptomatic; attention was focused on their rigid and deterministic definition of sexuality as “natural,” pregiven, or biological. Among Kruger’s generation, gender was not regarded as an innate or “essential” condition, but rather as a construction produced through representation. Sexuality was regarded as the result of signification and semiotic effects, rather than of biology—a perspective that offers the possibility of changing our restrictive definitions of gender. Masculinity and femininity came to be seen as the products of adaptation to social standards of sexuality, in which the impact of signs play a determining role. In a manner with radical implications for the visual arts, discussions converged on the politics of the image.K. Linker, Love for Sale – The Words and Pictures of Barbara Kruger New York, 1990, p. 59 Read More
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.jpg "Source: Christie's")
.jpg "Source: Christie's")
