This is the first major exhibition of the most important (and critically acclaimed) living US artist in Spain.

Barbara Kruger (USA, 1945) is 80 years old, but she maintains the same freshness and clinical eye she had when she began her paste-ups and collages almost fifty years ago. Especially because she still knows how to hit the nail on the head with the most accurate words . That's why her anti-consumerist messages, her messages for gender equality , and her messages against colonialism on a red background continue to be copied so often. If they were once vinyl, now she has no problem with digital. And if she used to rely on advertising jargon, now she has no qualms about the political and angry jargon of the internet.

“I shop therefore I am, ” her most iconic work, is already part of the popular vocabulary. “Admit nothing, blame everyone, be bitter” could be the T-shirt of the new politics of her country (and others), although there is nothing in the exhibition specifically about the US president . However, it is not necessary. Some words say it all, as she pointed out in an interview with this newspaper a few weeks ago: “Democrats, people on the left, tend to think Trump is an idiot . But no, Trump is not an idiot; he is a brilliant communicator and salesman . He has sold revenge, anger, and destruction to many people in the United States. And many people have bought what he was selling. Trump, of course, lies, but he lies very well. That's the problem.” And she used the word that best suited Trump's fears: “ Loser .”

Despite her relevance in the contemporary art world since the 1980s, her work has never been so powerfully presented on Spanish soil as it has now been at the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao, in the exhibition Barbara Kruger: Another Day, Another Night , which opens this Tuesday and strikes viewers with enormous immersive vinyls, videos, and many, many words. The artist did not attend the press presentation, but she did collaborate closely on the exhibition.

"Trump lies, but he lies very well. That's the problem." And she used the word that best suited Trump's fears: "loser."

“There are two important things about Kruger’s work. One is that she constantly revisits and rethinks her work. She created the paste-ups forty years ago and has now managed to bring them into the digital world,” says Lekka Hileman Waitoller, curator of this exhibition, to explain the artist’s ability to adapt to changing times. “And then there’s the relevance of the content. She finds the right words to engage the viewer on different topics. And these are immersive, very engaging works that also require an intellectual exercise. It’s an exhibition to read, think about, and reflect on,” adds Waitoller.

An exhibition to read

Yes, you come to this exhibition to read a lot. On the walls, on the ceiling and on the floor (the architectural space also plays a key role). The Guggenheim director herself, Miren Arzalluz , highlighted the political speeches, advertising slogans and religious doctrines (she did so again in Basque and Spanish) that are present in the different rooms and to which Kruger arrived after working for years as a graphic designer in magazines such as Mademoiselle in the late 60s. She was one of the artists who quickly saw that advertising and mass media were going to change art , but instead of limiting herself to reproductions of soup cans, she decided that her thing was going to be language. Ironic, acid , sometimes devastating, but also many times full of tenderness and hope .

The first room opens the viewer's eye to Kruger's magnum opus, the famous slogans from 1987 , "I buy, therefore I exist " ( No comment ). The walls of the work are surrounded by his 1983 paste-ups, recently reworked with new texts taken from the internet. Sound is also important in this exhibition —words like "Sorry ," "Hello ," and " I love you" suddenly reach the viewer's ear without knowing where they come from —as happens with a screen on which puzzle pieces are being placed.

We continued moving forward and came across a huge video collage where words—by the way, he plays a lot with languages, and there are words in Spanish, Basque, and English— reflect on censorship , self -censorship (which is always much worse), and the bombardment of information we all suffer daily. It also features talking cats and a cat stuck in a toilet (but a comfortable one).

More gunshots in the next room, with several very large screens and the word Truth occupying an entire giant wall. The curator explains: “It's a work from 2024, when it seems that truth is something that's in question these days. It's a reflection on fake news, not knowing where information comes from, on corruption… ” This large word is accompanied by texts and images that point to our data (one eye, one fingerprint) that everyone now has (where is security?), to the right to abortion , with the famous message “Your body is a battleground,” or to that “Admit nothing” that many politicians are now clinging to. Kruger is 80 years old, but he knows pretty well what's going on.

The war, the war

Two final rooms are reached through a corridor where she has also introduced Basque words as a nod to Bilbao and the Basque Country, as well as texts by writers such as James Baldwin and Roland Barthes . It is an exhibition with a lot of literature, like that room with a quote from Virginia Woolf on gender inequality pitted against a biblical text (I Corinthians), under the floor another quote from Orwell 's 1984, and a panel that marks the entire room that screams at us about wars ( wartime, war crime, war game, gang war, civil war, holy war ...) written by Kruger herself. In contrast, another text by the artist translated into Basque in which you can read phrases such as "in the end everything is forgotten, in the end everything is forgiven, in the end everything is fine ."

Hope, present in the poem "Another, another ," concludes in the final room with another pair of slaps from the artist to the world we live in. One, to nationalism with the expression "Our people" on the floor. "It's that confrontation : our people are better than yours, our people even smell better than yours. Kruger draws attention to the violence and anger of current political rhetoric," says Waitoller.

And even new technologies aren't spared, although the artist also works with them. Because she knows their many positive aspects, but also their dark sides . This is why her latest work, Entitled Connect , is a kind of mobile phone that displays various apps with names like "sexting," "shame," "control," "arrogance," "ignorance," and "SPAM."

Kruger is well into her eighties and knows the world she moves in (and its dangers, and its nonsense) very well . That's the feeling one gets when visiting this exhibition, which doesn't enter through the eyes, but rather delves more into the gray matter of each person. Here's a reflection she made in the interview for this newspaper about the power of images (and why she didn't want to be filmed): "I think holding a camera in front of another person is very powerful because it captures you; in a sense, it takes over. The irony today is that people are eager to photograph themselves , to take selfies; you can't go to any museum without seeing cameras. And I think I can move past all of that . I don't have to become a visible face ; it's my work that has to be seen, not me." Perhaps we should pay more attention to these reflections.