Confronting the viewer with its titular directive, Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (Look for the moment when pride becomes contempt) intercepts a black-and-white photograph of a boxer mid-strike with a sobering one-liner. Produced in 1993, the work captures Kruger’s iconic visual style and method of montage, layering bold white Sans Serif type in red text bars over archival, found imagery – a technique she first developed in the late 1970s and has finessed over four decades. Adopting the visual rhetoric of commercial advertising, Kruger probes systems of power, class, gender and consumerism.

Kruger began her career in the 1960s as a picture editor and graphic designer for Condé Nast’s fashion and lifestyle magazines, a role that introduced her to the cut-and-paste techniques that would remain fundamental to her renowned photo-collages of the 1980s and early 1990s. An avid photographer, Kruger began superimposing text onto her own photographic images in the early 1970s. However, in 1979, she made the decisive shift to work exclusively with found images, drawing from an extensive personal archive of newspapers, magazines and annuals, primarily from the 1940s and 1950s – a period of rapid technological innovation that fuelled a surge in advertising. Since then, she has expanded her repertoire to include digital media. Cropping, enlarging and embedding her own textual provocations, Kruger reinterprets the ubiquitous visual lexicon of advertising, transforming its anodyne appeal into images that disarm, seduce, instruct, implore, provoke and exhort – propaganda rendered self-aware. Art historian Jo Applin describes this as ‘the Kruger blueprint: levity shot through with something altogether darker’ (‘At the Serpentine: On Barbara Kruger’, London Review of Books, vol.46, no.6, 21 March 2024).

Kruger frequently repurposes her images and text, deliberately omitting attribution to the original sources – an approach that aligns her work with conceptualist traditions of the readymade and positions her alongside the ‘Pictures Generation’, a group of artists, including Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince, who, like Kruger, employ strategies of appropriation and recontextualisation to critique consumer culture. The image of the two boxers featured in Untitled was previously displayed on a billboard at the Magasin Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Grenoble in 1992, accompanied by the phrases: ‘Toute violence est l’illustration d’un stéréotype pitoyable’ (‘All violence is the illustration of a pitiful stereotype’) and ‘L’empathie peut changer le monde’ (‘A little empathy changes the world’). Two years later, in 1994, the work’s maxim, ‘Look for the moment when pride becomes contempt’, appeared in Kruger’s installation for the tramway in Strasbourg.

During her early years as an artist, Kruger’s text-image posters were pasted onto billboards and walls across the streets of New York. As her reputation grew in the 1980s, her works began to enter the gallery marketplace. Despite this shift, Kruger remained committed to engaging viewers through direct address, preserving the visual immediacy of her works’ public origins. ‘Direct address has motored my work from the very beginning’, Kruger remarked in 1999. ‘I like it because it cuts through the grease. […] I’m interested in how identities are constructed, how stereotype are formed, how narratives sort of congeal and become history’ (Interview with Lynne Tillman, in Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You, exh. cat., The Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, 1999, p.189).

In Untitled, Kruger’s use of half-tone printing – a technique that builds the image through pixellated ink dots – blurs the distinction between the two boxers, emphasising their shared physiognomy. Combined with Kruger’s textual interjection, the work gestures towards the self-destructive nature of excessive pride. This printing technique recalls the pioneering methods of Andy Warhol, whose practice likewise bridged the realms of fine art, craft and commercial media. After Warhol’s death in 1987, Kruger reflected on her intent to move beyond the ‘cool hum of power’ of his silent images, opting instead to pursue the loud collision of image with word (Kruger’s obituary for Warhol, ‘Contempt and Adoration’, The Village Voice, 5 May 1987).

The power of Kruger’s art lies in her radical reconfiguration of semiotic codes. Her taglines refuse to merely caption the image; her images decline simply illustrating the text. Under her careful construction, text and image are made pliant, each undermining the other’s meaning in service of the artist’s insurgent missive. Kruger has dedicated over 40 years to this graphic idiom, consistently drawing from her preferred typefaces – Futura Bold and Helvetica Ultra Compressed – collaging them onto appropriated black-and-white imagery. Her work, even as it critiques branding and authorship in mass media, has itself come to embody something of a signature style. Offering a postmodern riff on Magritte’s The Treachery of Images (1929), Kruger’s synthesis of image and text produces a cumulative impact that remains pertinent in today’s saturated media landscape. As foretold by Adrian Searle in response to her recent Serpentine show: ‘There’s no end to it. Kruger’s words are timebombs, prophetic detonations that never stop’ (‘As subtle as a brick in the face’, The Guardian, 31 January 2024).