Barbara Kruger: Forever

In celebration of the first anniversary of its opening of new space in Yongsan, Seoul, the Amorepacific Museum of Art is pleased to present Barbara Kruger’s first-ever solo exhibition in Asia featuring her major works from the 1980s up to her most recent room-wrap text installation. There will also be a video installation, and a world premiere of Kruger’s new works using the Korean alphabet.  

Kruger’s 16 small, black framed works, including Untitled (Your Gaze Hits the Side of My Face) (1981) and Untitled (Your Body is a Battleground) (1989), are seminal early paste-ups in which a text-image aesthetic deals with visual codes and the general production of knowledge. Equally insightful are Kruger’s 1980s black and white works in her signature red frame, and Untitled (Project for Dazed and Confused) (1996), which consists of six large-scale prints showing wry first-person imaginings of inner thoughts. Her four-channel video installation entitled The Globe Shrinks (2010) and a large-scale room-wrap installation Untitled (Forever) (2017) both invite visitors into an immersive experience inside a thought-provoking environment. Untitled (Plenty Should Be Enough) (2018) and its Korean version Untitled (2019), together with Untitled (2019) (all of them are specially designed by the artist for this show) will convey the artist’s commentary on consumerism, desire, politics, and other less obvious mechanisms of power that operate within contemporary society.

Kruger’s 2017 work Untitled (Forever), large texts covering all four walls and floor of the exhibition room, provides a visual shock with its exceptionally large scale and unusual presentation. The key thoughts mirror sentences from Virginia Woolf and George Orwell and thus unfold the artist’s ideas over the last 40 years in a very intense and immersive way. This work has been re-designed by the artist specifically for the Amorepacific Museum of Art and reveals her long-standing interest in architecture and the expanding scale of her installations. By actually being able to move inside the work, and existing within the huge font, one can enjoy moments where questions and thoughts are endlessly generated within us.

A specially prepared “archive room” will help to broaden and deepen our understanding of Barbara Kruger and of her creations, by showcasing magazines and newspapers she designed and participated in, together with an interview film with her in her own words.

Curated by Kyoungran Kim