Barbara Kruger: Untitled (Pride and Contempt)

Περιγραφή στα Αγγλικά

White letters in stark sans-serif sit hard against red, and the wall they cover runs ninety metres along the face of the National Library of Greece. You read it at walking pace, the way you read a billboard — except the message is interrogating you rather than selling to you, and you feel addressed, not advertised at.

Untitled (Pride and Contempt) is Barbara Kruger's first solo exhibition in Greece: thirteen new site-specific works the American artist made for the SNFCC's outdoor spaces, installed along the Canal and across the Esplanade. Kruger has spent five decades turning the grammar of advertising against itself, and here she does something she has not done before — the texts are written in Greek. They take on truth, power, critical thinking and individual agency, aimed squarely at Europe's current arguments over polarisation and the pull of extreme ideologies. The exhibition is curated by Katerina Stathopoulou.

If you want art held quietly behind glass in a hushed room, this is the opposite — it is public, weatherproof, and unavoidable as you move through the grounds. But if you want work that treats a public square as the right place to argue about power, Kruger has built it into the architecture here.

The works sit outdoors at the SNFCC on the Kallithea coast, open to encounter at any hour and best read in daylight; you meet them simply by walking the Canal, no ticket and no gallery hours. The run continues through 1 November 2026.