Barbara Kruger leaves question marks on LA during Frieze
In Los Angeles, Barbara Kruger leaves burning questions in weird and wonderful spaces during Frieze Week

Graphically bold and politically audacious, Barbara Kruger is known for plastering her unmissable slogans all over the place – an assimilation of mass media imagery and words reassembled and thrown back in the face of passive spectatorship. Sex, society and politics are Kruger’s primary materials – three topics that are as hot in the US today as they were when she started making work in the 1980s.
Kruger has legendary status in Los Angeles. As the place where the American myth and magic is constructed, and the heartland of media and entertainment in the US, LA has been an important city for the artist’s work over the years: in 1990 she installed her huge mural work ‘Untitled (Questions)’ at the MOCA, nine blazing questions on the subject of patriotism, civil rights and power, painted in the colours of the American flag across the museum’s south wall. In 2018, the work was reinstated at the museum – and will remain there until later this year.
Public installation from Barbara Kruger’s ‘Untitled (Questions)’ for Frieze LA.
‘Untitled (Questions)’ is so firmly rooted in the cultural landscape of Los Angeles that it became a natural starting point for Kruger’s latest intervention in the city, as part of Frieze Art Fair.
‘That billboard was installed in another time altogether, before the Internet and social media, and it is still so effective,’ says Bettina Korek, Executive Director of Frieze LA. ‘Barbara’s work is like a mirror the way it reflects back facets of the times. There are different conversations happening today than there were in 1990, but the most pressing ones are equally important. Kruger’s work guides people to listen to those conversations and think about their own experiences.’
Last year, Kruger participated in the fair by installing her questions around the backlot of Paramount Pictures – the location for Frieze – as part of the Frieze Projects programme. For Frieze LA’s 2020 edition, ‘Untitled (Questions)’ will be transformed into a city-wide project, the largest and most ambitious imagining of the work in public yet.
Public installation from Barbara Kruger’s ‘Untitled (Questions)’ for Frieze LA.
Frieze partnered with multiple civic organisations, including Metro, the West Hollywood Design District and Los Angeles Tourism and Convention Bureau, as well as sites including NeueHouse, The Forum, The Standard and Banc of California Stadium, to realize this sprawling project which will see landmark locations across the LA landscape covered with Kruger’s rousing questions. Each work being revealed up to and during the fair – and others, such as an installation at Union Square, staying on view until the summer.
At NeueHouse Hollywood on Sunset Boulevard a Kruger mural, WHO BUYS THE CON, has just been unveiled. As the first structure built intentionally for broadcast in 1938, NeueHouse occupying the original CBS studios, designed by Swiss-born architect William Lescaze, the location is a resonant canvas for Kruger’s ideas on mass communication and meaning. Kruger was also drawn to NeueHouse Hollywood as the site for this piece, as it is the last example of Lescaze’s architecture on the West Coast.
Barbara Kruger, ’WHO BUYS THE CON’ mural, on the façade of NeueHouse Hollywood.
‘It’s incredible to watch the evolutionary life of a project like this’, Korek reflects, on why the work remains as relevant. ‘[Untitled] Questions grabs people’s attention, which is so important to make an impact nowadays. Its enduring power is that even in this intensifying age of distraction, the project trusts that people still pay attention.
Public installation from Barbara Kruger’s ‘Untitled (Questions)’ for Frieze LA
Public installation from Barbara Kruger’s ‘Untitled (Questions)’ for Frieze LA
INFORMATION
’Untitled (Questions)’, realised in various locations throughout Los Angeles including NeueHouse Hollywood. For more information, visit frieze.com
Wallpaper* Newsletter
Receive our daily digest of inspiration, escapism and design stories from around the world direct to your inbox.
Charlotte Jansen is a journalist and the author of two books on photography, Girl on Girl (2017) and Photography Now (2021). She is commissioning editor at Elephant magazine and has written on contemporary art and culture for The Guardian, the Financial Times, ELLE, the British Journal of Photography, Frieze and Artsy. Jansen is also presenter of Dior Talks podcast series, The Female Gaze.
-
Beach chic: the all-new Citroën Ami gets an acid-tinged, open-air Buggy variant
Citroën have brought a dose of polychromatic playfulness to their new generation Ami microcar, the cult all-ages electric quadricycle that channels the spirit of the 2CV for the modern age
-
Wallpaper* checks in at Rosewood Miyakojima: ‘Japan, but not as most people know it’
Rosewood Miyakojima offers a smooth balance of intuitive Japanese ‘omotenashi’ fused with Rosewood’s luxury edge
-
Thrilling, demanding, grotesque and theatrical: what to see at Berlin Gallery Weekend
Berlin Gallery Weekend is back for 2025, and with over 50 galleries taking part, there's lots to see
-
Ai Weiwei’s new public installation is coming soon to Four Freedoms State Park
‘Camouflage’ by Ai Weiwei will launch the inaugural Art X Freedom project in September 2025, a new programme to investigate social justice and freedom
-
Leonard Baby's paintings reflect on his fundamentalist upbringing, a decade after he left the church
The American artist considers depression and the suppressed queerness of his childhood in a series of intensely personal paintings, on show at Half Gallery, New York
-
Unlike the gloriously grotesque imagery in his films, Yorgos Lanthimos’ photographs are quietly beautiful
An exhibition at Webber Gallery in Los Angeles presents Yorgos Lanthimos’ photography
-
Desert X 2025 review: a new American dream grows in the Coachella Valley
Will Jennings reports from the epic California art festival. Here are the highlights
-
Cowboys and Queens: Jane Hilton's celebration of culture on the fringes
Photographer Jane Hilton captures cowboy and drag queen culture for a new exhibition and book
-
New gallery Rajiv Menon Contemporary brings contemporary South Asian and diasporic art to Los Angeles
'Exhibitionism', the inaugural showcase at Rajiv Menon Contemporary gallery in Hollywood, examines the boundaries of intimacy
-
Helmut Lang showcases his provocative sculptures in a modernist Los Angeles home
‘Helmut Lang: What remains behind’ sees the artist and former fashion designer open a new show of works at MAK Center for Art and Architecture at the Schindler House
-
In ‘The Last Showgirl’, nostalgia is a drug like any other
Gia Coppola takes us to Las Vegas after the party has ended in new film starring Pamela Anderson, The Last Showgirl