It’s all getting a bit nihilistic for Barbara Kruger. The American art icon’s show of new work at Sprüth Magers is full of existential dread, hefty pessimism and grim monochrome.
It’s her usual ultra-bold statement art, but in fading shades of grey. ‘End of World’ greets you as you walk in, ‘forget to remember’, ‘long life, crazy desire’ and ‘being and nothingness’ hang in the next room. It’s introspective, gloomy, almost morbid. It’s weird – though not necessarily in a bad way – to see the trademark aggression and energy drained from her work to be replaced with fatalism and misery.
The early black and white collage works upstairs are more familiar, and totally brilliant, full of righteous ire, political invective, poetic meanderings, sneering sarcasm and acerbic wit. ‘We are not sugar and spice’ it says over an image of pigtails, ‘who speaks? who is silent?’ over a cupped ear, ‘make my day’ over a cat trailing raw meat from its mouth. Direct, confrontational, immediate.
Despite being so small, the show ends up being a lot more satisfying than Kruger’s big recent Serpentine exhibition. Seeing the work so simply makes you realise how overthought, over-egged, less immediate and infinitely more disappointing that show was. It seemed OK at the time, but in retrospect it didn’t work. Kruger’s art doesn’t need to be adapted to fit on TV screens, or animated, or interpreted, or rehashed. It felt like a greatest hits show without any of the hits. Her art is best when it’s like this: in your face, simple, unadulterated. That’s when you get what Kruger’s really trying to say, even if it’s a bit gloomy these days.