PRESENTATION: Barbara Kruger-Another day. Another night.

Barbara Kruger combines striking visual impact with a piercing analysis of contemporary reality. Kruger has gained wide recognition over the years, particularly for her signature style that combines black- and-white imagery with bold, provocative text—either written by her or drawn from various sources. By using formats like billboards and magazine ads, Kruger captures the attention of viewers who might not be the typical audience of this kind of artistic expression. In doing so, Kruger pushes the boundaries of contemporary art while broadening both her reach and influence.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Archive

The Guggenheim Museum Bilbao presents “Another Day. Another Night.”, the first major retrospective in Spain dedicated to Barbara Kruger, one of the most influential and uncompromising voices in contemporary art. Spanning over four decades of radical cultural interrogation, the exhibition offers an immersive journey through Kruger’s evolving practice—one that dissects the tangled relationships between image, language, and power with unflinching clarity and conceptual precision. For more than fifty years, Kruger has wielded a visual lexicon as immediate as advertising and as pointed as political critique. Her work confronts viewers head-on, using striking typography, stark imagery, and monumental scale to probe the structures that shape identity, desire, and belief. With razor-sharp wit and philosophical weight, Kruger’s art demands attention—and reflection. Kruger’s visual authority is deeply rooted in her early years as a graphic designer in the 1960s, when she worked as a page designer and picture editor for magazines such as Mademoiselle and House & Garden. That experience—shaping the visual rhythms of editorial content—instilled in her a sensitivity to the mechanics of visual persuasion and mass communication. It was during this period that Kruger began experimenting with black-and-white photographic imagery layered with short, declarative text—a format that would become foundational to her later work. Her use of sans serif typefaces, most notably Futura Bold and Helvetica Ultra Compressed, emerged from this design lineage. These fonts, prized for their clarity and assertiveness, became tools for visual disruption. They allowed Kruger to “cut through the grease,” as she once put it—interrupting the stream of media with messages that confront rather than seduce. But for Kruger, text is more than just content. It is form, texture, volume—a visual element as potent as any image. Her early paste-ups marked the beginning of an ongoing exploration into how language not only communicates meaning but constructs it, manipulates it, weaponizes it.

“Another Day. Another Night.” transforms the Guggenheim Bilbao’s galleries into a fully enveloping environment of sound, image, and text—a charged space where Kruger’s conceptual investigations come to life. Developed in close collaboration with the artist, the exhibition revisits iconic works while premiering new installations that extend her reach into the digital realm. At the exhibition’s entrance stands one of Kruger’s most enduring pieces: “Untitled (I shop therefore I am)” (1987), originally created as a photographic silkscreen and reimagined in 2019 as a towering LED installation. Over five meters tall, it pulses with animation and sound, slowly revealing and then remixing its famous slogan with variations like “I shop therefore I hoard” and “I need therefore I shop.” Accompanied by the clang of metal, these evolving phrases riff on Descartes’ cogito, recasting it as a meditation on consumption, identity, and the hollow promises of capitalism. This interplay between the philosophical and the pop-cultural permeates the exhibition. Kruger doesn’t merely quote; she reconfigures. Her works are constructed from fragments of speeches, advertisements, doctrinal slogans, and internet slang—each piece dissecting and reassembling the language that circulates through public and private life. Her messages are urgent but never simplistic; intimate yet impersonal. They demand that we reckon with the words we use and the systems those words sustain. A sense of timely foreboding pulses through works such as Untitled (Forever), in which George Orwell’s chilling prophecy—“If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever”—looms in massive black-and-white text. The resonance with today’s political landscape is inescapable.

In “Untitled (Verdad)”, the Spanish word for “truth” fades gradually from black to gray, prompting reflection on the erosion of fact in a media-saturated era. Here, truth itself becomes slippery—subject to manipulation, erosion, or disappearance. Other works, such as the “Rogue Audio” installations, offer a surprising contrast. Softly spoken phrases—“I love you,” “Sorry”—drift through the space, creating moments of unexpected intimacy amid the confrontational visuals. These auditory whispers expose the emotional currents that run beneath Kruger’s more declarative statements. Kruger’s sensitivity to place is foregrounded in “Untitled (Camino)” (2025), a new site-specific work created in both Spanish and Basque. Designed in response to Bilbao’s unique cultural and linguistic identity, the piece connects the exhibition’s winding galleries like a conceptual thread. It underscores a central tenet of Kruger’s practice: that language is never neutral. It is shaped by—and in turn shapes—the politics of place. “Language is a powerful force,” Kruger notes. “It speaks of hierarchies, of adoration and contempt. And it has a very site-specific element to it, in that each place carries its own vernacular and embedded histories.” This attentiveness to linguistic nuance infuses the entire exhibition, where the tension between clarity and ambiguity is ever-present. Words shout, whisper, dissolve, and reappear—circulating like viral memes or rallying cries, reasserting their power in every room. “Another Day. Another Night.” is not just a retrospective. It’s a reminder of how art can rupture complacency. In an age where images are engineered for maximum scrollability and language is routinely weaponized, Kruger offers a form of resistance: not through retreat, but through bold, unrelenting confrontation. Her work remains a vital mirror to our times—distorted, incisive, and urgently reflective. The show reaffirms Kruger’s enduring relevance, proving that in a world overflowing with messages, hers still pierce through the noise. At a time when truth is contested, media omnipresent, and language a battlefield, Barbara Kruger’s art refuses passive consumption. It asks us not just to look, but to think—and in doing so, to see differently.

Photo: Barbara Kruger, Bitte lachen / Please cry, Installation view, Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin, April 29– August 28, 2022, Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers / Mies van der Rohe, VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2022, Photo: Timo Ohler

Info: Curator: Lekha Hileman Waitoller, Guggenheim Museum Bilbao, Abandoibarra et.2, Bilbao, Spain, Duration: 24/6-9/11/2025, Days & Hours: Tue-Sun 10:00-20:00 (t16/6-21/9), 10:00-19:00 (22/9-15/6), www.guggenheim-bilbao.eus/