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Untitled (Your Seeing Is Believing)

1984
Not on view
In her montages, Kruger suffuses the idyllic imagery of American advertising with explicit dread, turning the language of commerce on itself. She first began working with collage in the late 1960s, as a layout designer for Mademoiselle magazine. This crash course in commercial design would come to shape her mature style of image appropriation, realized here. Superimposed over stock photography of a man and woman gazing skyward, a short, declarative statement undermines the scene’s ostensible optimism. "My work tries to be substitutional," Kruger has said, "to somehow inject meaning where the message had previously been: ‘Buy this sweater, it’ll change your life.’"

Artwork Details

Object Information
  • Title: Untitled (Your Seeing Is Believing)
  • Artist: Barbara Kruger (American, born Newark, New Jersey, 1945)
  • Date: 1984
  • Medium: Gelatin silver print
  • Dimensions: Image: 114.3 × 248.9 cm (45 × 98 in.)
    Frame: 129.9 × 263.2 × 5.1 cm (51 1/8 in. × 8 ft. 7 5/8 in. × 2 in.)
  • Classification: Photographs
  • Credit Line: Purchase, Louis V. Bell, Harris Brisbane Dick, Fletcher, and Rogers Funds and Joseph Pulitzer Bequest; Vital Projects Fund Inc. Gift, through Joyce and Robert Menschel; and Stephen and Jennifer Rich, Anonymous, and Gary and Sarah Wolkowitz Gifts, 2013
  • Object Number: 2013.42
  • Rights and Reproduction: © Barbara Kruger
  • Curatorial Department: Photographs

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