Press Release

Skarstedt Gallery is pleased to present the exhibition Pre-digital 1980 – 1992, by Barbara Kruger. These works, professionally known as “paste-ups,” share a methodology derived from Kruger’s experience as an editorial designer at various magazines. However, the meanings they create are worlds away from the decorative delusions that fill the magazines. Her ability to construct powerful messages using an inherently commercial technique focuses attention on how images and words have the power to make meaning: to construct who we are and who we want to be. In Thinking of You, Steven Heller states, “…her work resonates for its audacity in attacking assumptions of power as much for transforming, through her choice of public address, the essence of art itself.” These works, all forty-four of which were created before the wide spread use of digital imagery, vary in size but are no larger than 11 x 13 inches. They are composed of altered images from the media and texts, which work to transform those images, both visually and conceptually. A negative of the works was then produced and used to make enlarged versions of these initial “paste ups”. The exhibition of these intimately scaled artworks explores a unique stage of Kruger’s career. To see these well known images in this smaller scale invites a renewed focus on her use of “direct address” and how it has threaded through her production: from these enlargement-ready images to billboards, matchbooks, t-shirts and, over the last 15 years, to large scale video installations and public works that critically engage the notions of the "public" and site specificity.

Barbara Kruger was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1945. She currently lives in both Los Angeles, California and New York and teaches at the University of California, Los Angeles. She has been the subject of many one-person exhibitions, including a comprehensive retrospective at the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1999, which traveled to The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York in 2000. More recently, she has exhibited large-scale installations at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm, Tramway in Glasgow, Scotland, the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art in Melbourne, Australia, and at BCAM at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, among others. She was honored with the “Golden Lion” award for Lifetime Achievement at the Venice Biennale in 2005.

A fully illustrated catalogue will accompany this exhibition. Please contact Valerie Marquez at (212) 737-2060 or valerie@skarstedt.com for any further information.