Photograph by Daniel Terna
Triple Canopy is pleased to announce a new edition by Barbara Kruger, published on the occasion of the magazine’s upcoming benefit honoring novelist, short-story writer, and critic Lynne Tillman. Kruger, who earlier in her career worked as a designer for publications such as House and Garden and Mademoiselle, eventually employed her graphic sensibility to criticize the commercial messages propagated in mass media and the underlying power structures. Produced in the artist’s signature palette of black, white, and red, Untitled (Use It or Lose It) cuttingly reframes a trite aphorism and, more broadly, the language of advertising. Kruger’s works have circulated as billboards, large-scale murals, posters, prints on city buses, and, less commonly, as editions. For the past twenty years, Kruger has also created immersive installations that employ “room wraps” and multi-channel video works.
Tillman explains how the edition came about: “Barbara asked me to give her a number of sentences or phrases, which I did. I sent a list. But I knew, once I’d thought of it, that she’d go for: Use It or Lose It. It seemed perfect, because of the wordplay and its being an often-used phrase with many possible meanings.”
A conceptual artist, designer, and writer, Kruger has been making art since the early 1960s. Kruger’s work was recently the subject of a major solo exhibition at Modern Art Oxford. Her work is part of group shows this year at the Seattle Art Museum; Museum of Fort Worth, Texas; the Hammer Museum, Los Angeles; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. Kruger currently resides in Los Angeles, where she serves on the faculty at UCLA.