American collage artist Barbara Kruger is internationally famous for superimposing messages in Futura Bold Oblique font on pre-existing photographs.
Her text questions consumerism, individual autonomy and feminism and the images she uses are often culled from mainstream media ads. Besides galleries, her work appears on t-shirts, mugs, bus placards and billboards, "confusing the boundaries between art and commerce and calling attention to the role of the advertising in public debate".
The NYT reviewed Kruger's October exhibit at the Whitney Museum this way: "In broad terms, much of Ms. Kruger’s recent art is similar to the work that made her famous 30 years ago, built around puckish, aphoristic bits of texts that are at once politically biting and coolly aloof."
Futura is a sans-serif range designed by German typographer Paul Renner in 1927. It's heavily influenced by Bauhaus style, and is derived from strong geometric shapes. Volkswagen, HP and Shell all use variations of it in their advertising.
Renner expressed his view of typeface design in 1947:
"Type reveals not only the character of whoever designed it. It also reveals the character of the people who use it, just like the handwriting of the individual. Therefore, what sort of characters we use concerns us all. Each populace has the script it deserves, for each time period, the script that corresponds to its nature.”
Kruger got her start working in the graphic design department of Mademoiselle magazine.
