Barbara Kruger: When Pride Becomes Contempt

Barbara Kruger’s first solo exhibition in Greece, Untitled (Pride and Contempt), is currently on view at the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center (SNFCC) in Athens. Art critic and 300Magazine cofounder Julia Sysalova explores how a language Kruger developed more than five decades ago has become remarkably attuned to the way we communicate and consume information today.

Some artists change their language as the world changes. Then there is the rarer case: the language barely changes, but time itself seems to move toward it. This is exactly what has happened with Barbara Kruger. What is most interesting about the exhibition is not even the scale of the works, impressive as it is. It is the sense of how naturally Kruger’s artistic language belongs to the world we live in today. She has been working with words for more than fifty years. Large letters, sharp contrasts, short phrases, direct addresses to the viewer. Her language is instantly recognizable, and just as easily mistaken for the language of advertising, political posters, or the media.

Advertising uses a few words to shorten the distance between desire and action: you see it, you want it, you buy it. A political slogan tries to make something complicated appear simple: you see it, you believe it, you join. Kruger takes the same mechanism and turns it in the opposite direction. She does not tell us what to think. She interrupts the automatic way in which we usually receive words and messages—this feels particularly important today, when the short phrase has become one of the basic units of communication. 

We live inside a constant flow of messages competing for our attention, be it a headline, a post, a comment, a notification, a slogan, or a few words on a screen. What Kruger began exploring decades ago has become the everyday reality of almost everyone. This may be why her work does not seem to age. If anything, time has made it easier to understand.

Her best-known works already contained the questions that continue to define our lives. I Shop Therefore I Am (1987) reduced the relationship between consumption and identity to five words. Your Body Is a Battleground (1989) turned a direct statement into a powerful question about the body, power, and who has the right to control it. The images belong to another period, but the questions do not.

Barbara Kruger’s exhibition Untitled (Pride and Contempt) at SNFCC

In Athens, this continuity becomes especially clear. Thirteen new large-scale works have been created for the SNFCC, including a 90-meter work across the building of the National Library of Greece. Texts appear along the Canal, across the Esplanade, and directly on the architecture. They are not gathered inside a single exhibition hall, and they do not require the viewer to make a conscious decision: now I am going to look at art.

You simply walk, talk, look around and suddenly you encounter a sentence that seems to be speaking directly to you. This, to me, is one of Kruger’s greatest strengths. She does not create a separate art world that the viewer has to deliberately enter. She intervenes in the everyday world we already inhabit. 

The decision to use Greek for the Athens project makes this even stronger. The texts no longer feel like works by a famous American artist temporarily brought to Athens. They begin to belong to this place: to its architecture, to the city, and to the people who pass them every day.

The phrases themselves are almost provocatively simple:

Το κακό είναι καλό (“Evil is good”).

Η αλήθεια είναι μύθος (“Truth is a myth”).

Ο πρώτος είναι τελευταίος (“The first is the last”).

Όλα επιτρέπονται (“Everything is permitted”).

Each phrase looks like a statement, but none really behaves like one. Kruger uses the form of certainty to create doubt. The words seem to tell us something definite, yet almost immediately make us question what we have just read. She borrows the language of persuasion to make us think about why we are so easily persuaded in the first place.

Barbara Kruger’s exhibition Untitled (Pride and Contempt) at SNFCC

And then, across the 90-meter façade of the National Library of Greece, comes the sentence that seems to hold the entire exhibition together: Πρόσεχε τη στιγμή που η περηφάνια γίνεται περιφρόνηση (“Watch for the moment when pride becomes contempt.”)

In Athens, these words inevitably acquire another layer. Written across the National Library, in a city where history is physically present almost everywhere, and in a country where ideas of heritage and national identity carry particular weight, “pride” is not an abstract word. Neither is “contempt.” Kruger does not tell us exactly where one ends and the other begins. She asks us to notice the moment when one becomes the other. The distance between them can be remarkably short. 

There is a famous phrase by Jacques Derrida, the French philosopher and one of the most influential thinkers of the 20th century: Il n’y a pas de hors-texte, often translated as “There is nothing outside the text.” Walking through Kruger’s exhibition in Athens, it is difficult not to think of it. Here, text has escaped the page, the poster, and even the exhibition space. It stretches across a library façade, enters the landscape, interrupts a walk, and becomes part of the city itself.

This also helps explain why her art feels so relevant today. We live in a world where someone is constantly fighting for our attention. We are told what to want, what to buy, whom to admire, what to fear, what to believe, and even who we should become.

Kruger uses the same weapons: words and images, but she is not selling us anything. Instead, she gives us back that brief moment between receiving a message and reacting to it, in which we can still stop and think for ourselves.

Sometimes art really does not need to say very much. A few words, placed in exactly the right place, are enough to make us see differently a space we have crossed a hundred times before and, perhaps, to see ourselves a little differently too.

Barbara Kruger: Untitled (Pride and Contempt)
April 28 – November 1, 2026
Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center, Athens