Barbara Kruger

uch of Kruger's work engages the merging of found photographs from existing sources with pithy and aggressive text that involves the viewer in the struggle for power and controlthat her captions speak to. In their trademark white letters against a slash of red background, some of her instantly recognizable slogans read “I shop therefore I am,” and “Your bodyis a battleground." Much of her text questions the viewer about feminism, consumerism, and individual autonomy and desire, although her black-and-white images are culled from themainstream magazines that sell the very ideas she is disputing.
Kruger juxtaposes her imagery and text containing criticism of sexism and the circulation of power within cultures isa recurring motif in Kruger's work. The text in her works of the 1980s includes such phrases as "Your comfort is my silence" (1981), "You invest in the divinity of the masterpiece"(1982), and "I shop therefore I am" (1987). She has said that "I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are and who we aren’t."[2] A largercategory that threads through her work is the appropriation and alteration of existing images. The importance of appropriation art in contemporary culture lay in its ability to playwith preponderant imagistic and textual conventions: to mash up meanings and create new ones.
Kruger's early monochrome pre-digital works, known as ‘paste ups’, reveal theinfluence of the artist’s experience as a magazine editorial designer during her early career. These small scale works, the largest of which is 11 x 13 inches, are composed of alteredfound images, and texts either culled from the media or invented by the artist. A negative of each work was then produced and used to make enlarged versions of these initial ‘paste