CORY REYNOLDS | DATE 6/3/2021

Electrifying 'Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You' is a New Release this week!

Featured spreads are from Barbara Kruger: Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You—easily one of the most engaging, relevant and graphically compelling books on our Spring 2021 list—published by DelMonico Books and Los Angeles County Museum of Art in advance of a highly-anticipated five-decade retrospective opening at the Art Institute of Chicago in September of 2021, en route to LACMA in 2022 with a related exhibition at MoMA spanning into early 2023. Zoé Whitley writes, “With the observational skill and rigor of a social anthropologist, Kruger has maintained a lifetime interest in recording human behavior in capitalist society, drawing on social semiotics and retinal perception to reflect our basest impulses and most selfish desires back to us.… Kruger creates situations where we can meaningfully engage in systemic critique as well as self-reflection. How often might we otherwise consider the psychosocial stakes of feeling superior or inferior to others? Of examining our own actions when looking down on someone else, or reflecting upon the circumstances dictating whom we look up to? A clairvoyant narrator confronts us, conjuring images in the mind’s eye of our vulnerabilities and those, unseen, who might exploit them. Caught between this proverbial rock and hard place, the viewer must choose where to stand between hierarchies of speaking up and hero worship.… Barbara Kruger doesn’t stand apart from the critiques she evinces, nor does she judge her audience for the positions individually taken to behold or to opt out. Instead, she optimistically offers, ‘There can be—and hopefully there is—separation between self-belief and narcissism.’ For all its black-and-white clarity, Kruger’s art ultimately revels in the gray areas, luring us into the nuances to be found in between extremes.”