Brilliantly striking and seductive, Barbara Kruger’s Untitled (My Face is Your Fortune) confronts its viewers with a message that is as gripping and relevant today as its initial execution in 1982, illustrating the alluring beauty and biting commentary characteristic of Kruger’s celebrated oeuvre. Kruger was a pivotal member of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists influenced by Conceptual and Pop Art who utilized appropriation and montage to reveal the constructed nature of images, producing work that often resembled advertising. Pulling from her earlier work as a graphic designer, Kruger constructs Untitled (My Face is Your Fortune) by cropping, overlaying, enlarging and framing her image and text to maximum impact. A masterful interplay of text, image, and typography in a style that has made Barbara Kruger one of the most recognizable artists of the second half of the 20^th century, Untitled (My Face is Your Fortune) radically deconstructs the methods of advertising and mass media to produce a searing criticism of the manipulative nature of capitalist marketing and its implicit misogyny.

Untitled (My Face is Your Fortune) upends the slick, glossy beauty image of a woman splashing water onto her face, employing graphic design strategies to direct attention to pernicious systems of power. Closely cropped and rendered in striking grisaille that heightens the depths shadows and the glowing highlights, the figure is depersonalized and rendered inert as the subject of the viewer’s gaze. Bold text slashes across the face, its message creating an image that appears emotional, volatile, and even ominous. The concise, evocative wording in Untitled (My Face is Your Fortune) creates a powerful disjunction between lexicographical implication and image, imbuing the work with a multiplicity of meaning. Frozen in the moment of impact, the figure’s eyes squeeze shut, and brows draw together, a serene visage transformed into an expression that verges on disgust or anger. Drops of water, frozen in mid-air, seem almost sculptural, their impact on the figure palpable and forceful. The saturated red border around the image functions as visual beacon, an alluring sign screaming “Look here! This is important!” whilst evoking early 20^th century Russian photomontages concerned with harnessing photography and film to reach a mass audience and unmask fake ideologies.

Kruger began her career as a graphic designer for the Condé Nast magazine Mademoiselle in the late 1960s after studying for a year under Diane Arbus and Marvin Israel at the Parson’s School of Design. The artist remained in the commercial editorial world into the mid-1970s, during which t.mes she developed a keen understanding of the effect of manipulating text and images and their “codes of seduction”, as the artist would later say, their powerful ability to engage and provoke desired responses in viewers. "Pictures and words seem to become the rallying points for certain assumptions. There are assumptions of truth and falsity and I guess the narratives of falsity are called fictions,” says Kruger, “I replicate certain words and watch them stray from or coincide with the notions of fact and fiction." (Barbara Kruger, “All Tomorrow’s Parties by Barbara Kruger & Richard Prince”, Bomb Magazine, Spring 1982, P.140) Kruger consistently challenges social, political and sexual boundaries, encouraging viewers to question traditional socio-cultural structures. “All art contains a politic, as does every conversation we have, every deal we make, and every face we kiss. Whether producing collects ively or individually, we are responsible for the meaning which we create. I see my work as a series of attempts to ruin certain representations, to displace the subject and to welcome a female spectator in the audience of men” (Barbara Kruger quoted in Masako Kamimura, “Review: Barbara Kruger: Art of Representation”, Woman's Art Journal Vol. 8, No. 1, Spring/Summer 1987, P. 40)

Addressing the viewer with the deictic “your”, Untitled (My Face is Your Fortune) “make[s] the commodity speak via direct address to its viewer and possible purchaser.” (Kruger in Mark Sanders, “Being Barbara Kruger”, Another Magazine, Spring/Summer 2004, P.384) Through the work’s confrontational address, Kruger explores the post-modern self as a decentralized identity constructed and through visual representation, implicating the viewer in a candid critique. Kruger is “concerned with the way our conception of the self is all too often mediated through other channels. The ideal of the self therefore becomes but a construct, a combination of multiple, fragmented images and discourses that inform and control our everyday lives.” (Kruger in Mark Sanders, “Being Barbara Kruger”, Another Magazine, Spring/Summer 2004, P.382) Kruger draws attention to the way in which the media interprets and reduces our world view and sense of self. Appropriating images from look books, advertisements, and how to manuals, Kruger reproduces her findings at a massive scale with a signature red borders that transform the image into an acquirable and desirable object, a method intended to arouse consciousness of art as a commodity.

Untitled (My Face is Your Fortune) is as arresting in its visual format as it is groundbreaking in its artistic stat.mes nt. Mimicking ad-speak, the present work boldly confronts the relationship between consumption and culture, exposing the inescapable conditions involved in contemporary production in a manner that is witty, provoking and visually explosive. Untitled's alluring beauty and biting edge epitomize Kruger’s dynamic oeuvre and evince her position as one of the most compelling and radical artists working today.

Artist

Barbara Kruger