Barbara Kruger: Another Day Another Night at Guggenheim Bilbao

Courtesy of the artist Guggenheim Museum Bilbao and Spruth Magers

By MICHAEL KLEIN September 10, 2025

The work of this artist of the 80s has never gone out of style. In fact, seeing her current show at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, one sees how she has turned words and language into the most powerful artistic tool. 

In a recent online newsletter, her unique background is explained: In the late 1960s, Barbara Kruger worked as a graphic designer and image editor for publications such as Mademoiselle and House & Garden, where her visual language began to take shape. After honing her drawing skills in public, Kruger adopted the Futura Bold and Helvetica Ultra Compressed typefaces early in her art career for their strong visual impact and readability.  

For this event, she makes use of the entire building, not just a magazine page. Here, she is covering the walls and floors with her ideas and phrases to create a unique, highly conceptual installation. Though present in an art setting, the halls of a museum, it is art for the public, addressing the public, reaching out to engage the public in a dialogue between writer and reader, here artist and museum visitor. She has presented similar multilevel installations recently in a variety of venues around the globe: Los Angeles, Bonn, Germany, and Aarhus, Denmark. 

In 2022 at the Venice Biennale, akin to Lawrence Weiner and Jenny Holzer or Joseph Kosuth, all of whom posit the notion that words can be as powerful an instrument of art as a paintbrush, Kruger goes one step further, monumentalizing her phrases, slogans, and sentences. Laid out on a long wall or wide floor, they are not to be missed, as if spoken to the viewer, each statement is both loud and clear. Her statements focus on the most contemporary of subject matter from feminism, consumerism, capitalism, to the very notion of individual liberty and freedom. 

In this grand space, the walls of the museum become billboards. In one gallery, there are freestanding kiosks with video features, each with images, one reads “Your Body is A Battle Ground”. In another gallery, a series of contiguous walls covered with compound smaller images, and on a freestanding wall, images of people wearing t-shirts with a Kruger slogan on each individual. These shifts of scale keep you moving, looking to find more. There is a density of language and, at the same time, a clarity in her presentation.

Now, some three decades from her first exhibitions alongside those of the Picture Generation, she embarked on a direction all her own. Moving from small-scale photographic collages to large monumental works and installations. Each show is characterized by her trademark red, black, and white. Bold colors emphasize the dramatic effect she is after, nothing that might cloud the direct tone of each work. The colors say stop and look, and pay attention. 

In a world now in which we practically speak in text, Kruger seems the most contemporary of artists. Words have become more powerful, more important, demanding our attention. The universality of the English language allows almost anyone to understand and “enjoy” the works. (Though here in Spain, much has been translated into Spanish.) 

This is not poetry nor verse: these are declarations, explanations, comments, and observations from the point of view of a mature woman artist working in the 21st century. Hers is the most public of what might be public art. And with this exhibition and many such recent projects, it is evident that this public is an international one and her art in its many formats addresses a savvy international audience. 

Now that we live in a digital age, we know that words are the tools of the present and the future. Kruger demonstrates as an artist how words can be a force of nature, not only a vehicle of observation but a way to inform the world. WM