“I try to make work that joins the seductions of wishful thinking with the criticality of knowing better,” Barbara Kruger has said. An incisive critic of popular culture, Kruger addresses the viewer directly as a way of exposing the power dynamics underlying identity, desire, and consumerism. Kruger’s large-scale commission for MoMA will envelop the Marron Family Atrium with the artist’s bold textual statements about truth, belief, and power.

Combining images drawn from mass-media photographs with provocatively concise language, Kruger has been creating explorations of social relationships imbued with her distinctive sense of urgency and humor for more than 40 years. MoMA’s installation will tap into the artist’s long-standing interest in architecture to immerse viewers in a thought-provoking environment, offering multiple points of entry and perspective. With characteristic force, the work will explore the ways that relationships between spatial and political power invariably relate to considerations of inclusion and exclusion, dominance and agency.