Barbara Kruger's Thinking of You. I Mean Me. I Mean You (2021)
Installation view, The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago (September 19, 2021–January 24, 2022)
Courtesy the artist and Sprüth Magers; Photo: The Art Institute of Chicago
A triumvirate of important US artists—Barbara Kruger, Judy Chicago and Lauren Halsey—will all have solo exhibitions next year at the Serpentine Galleries in London as part of a programme presenting practitioners “across generations who continue to set the political agenda”, a gallery statement says.
New Jersey-born Kruger began developing her trademark bold photo and text collages in 1977, confronting the viewer with provocative maxims such as “My beliefs are short and sweet.” In the exhibition at Serpentine South (1 February-17 March 2024), the artist will show key works such as Untitled (I shop therefore I am), 1987/2019 and Untitled (Your body is a battleground), 1989/2019.
The Serpentine show is a new version of an exhibition seen previously at Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In a review of the MoMA show earlier this year, we reported that Kruger is “blessed with arch graphic design skills and a wry sense of humour”, adding that in the 1980s, Kruger made collages anticipating the meme as a dominant form of contemporary culture and understood going viral before the invention of the phrase.
Detail from Judy Chicago's In the Beginning from Birth Project (1982)
© Judy Chicago/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York; Photo © Donald Woodman/ARS, NY
In June last year, David Zwirner (who represents the artist) posted a text image by Kruger criticising the UK Supreme court ruling overturning the landmark Roe v. Wade decision that had guaranteed the constitutional right to abortion for 49 years. “The end of Roe is the result of the Republicans’ relentless campaign to restrict reproductive rights and control women’s bodies,” Kruger said in a statement.
Meanwhile the exhibition Judy Chicago: Revelations (Serpentine North; 22 May-1 September 2024) will focus on the artist’s drawings. Bringing together “archival and never-before-seen works, preparatory studies, notebooks and sketchbooks that reveal her working process… the exhibition will present the ways in which drawings functions as a mode to express Chicago’s innermost thoughts”.
Lauren Halsey's land of the sunshine wherever we go II (2021)
Courtesy Lauren Halsey
Chicago’s first solo presentation in a London institution follows her first comprehensive survey in New York at the New Museum (12 October-14 January 2024) which explores six decades of the feminist artist’s practice across three floors.
Rising star Lauren Halsey—whose work melds African diaspora influences, funk music and Egyptian relief carving—will show a new installation at the Serpentine South (4 October-5 January 2025). Earlier this year she unveiled a pharaonic temple on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum in New York.