Barbara Kruger’s Paris Takeover, Explained: Orwell, Light Boxes and the Supreme Connection

If the white type on red blocks in the photos from Paris looks familiar, you aren’t imagining it. Barbara Kruger, the American artist whose work Complex once said “explicitly inspired” Supreme’s box logo, has covered the rotunda of the Bourse de Commerce in her words. The History of Tears opened Wednesday (Oct. 7) at the Pinault Collection’s Paris museum and runs until Jan. 25, 2027.

What is The History of Tears?

It’s a new installation made for two spaces in the building: the rotunda, ringed by Tadao Ando’s curved concrete walls, and the 24 display cases in the passage around it. Ando’s walls now carry giant quotations from George Orwell’s 1984 and Aimé Césaire’s Journal of a Homecoming, according to the Pinault Collection. The floor spells out Orwell’s line about a boot stamping on a human face, forever, and one panel borrows Césaire’s reminder that “life is not a spectacle.”

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The display cases have become light boxes for Kruger’s own commands. “SLAP IT,” “HUG IT” and “HURT IT” are among them, and Hypebeast spotted “MORALIZE IT” and “KISS IT.” Two videos are folded in, including Power, Pleasure, Desire, Disgust, which Kruger made for the Wexner Center for the Arts in Columbus, Ohio, and first showed in 1996.

The title comes from a phrase that runs through her work, “Who Will Write the History of Tears?” Kruger’s own note on the piece reads like one of her slogans stretched into a paragraph.

An ongoing deluge of the eyes. A fountain of loss and fear. But also of power, pleasure, desire and disgust.

Barbara Kruger, on The History of Tears, Pinault Collection

Why does it look like Supreme?

Because Supreme looks like Kruger. Since 1979 her signature has been black-and-white photographs, often lifted from magazines of the 1940s and ’50s, overprinted with slogans in Futura Bold Italic, the museum notes. She also worked as a designer in advertising and fashion before turning those techniques back on consumer culture. Streetwear fans know the look from Supreme’s white-on-red box logo, which Complex wrote in 2013 was “explicitly inspired” by her work.

What has Kruger said about Supreme?

For years, very little. Then Supreme sued Leah McSweeney’s label Married to the Mob over its “Supreme Bitch” T-shirts, set in the style of the Supreme logo, and in May 2013 a Complex reporter asked Kruger what she made of it. She replied with a blank email and an attachment. Complex put her verdict in its headline: “A Ridiculous Clusterf**k of Totally Uncool Jokers.”

That tension is part of the fun in Paris. Kruger’s art borrows the voice of advertising to point at power and consumer culture, the Pinault Collection says, while the streetwear brand most associated with her look turned the same red-box style into one of fashion’s most recognizable logos.

What else is on?

The rotunda also opens Remember Me, a show marking 200 years of photography with more than 700 works by over 70 artists, from Man Ray and Lee Miller to Nan Goldin, Cindy Sherman and Wolfgang Tillmans. It takes its name from Kruger’s Untitled (Remember Me) (1988/2020), and both shows are curated by Matthieu Humery, the Pinault Collection’s photography advisor.

Paris is about to get busier, too: Art Basel Paris fills the Grand Palais from Oct. 23 to 25. Kruger, born in 1945, ends her note on the piece by saying that tears “can show and tell us how we were, how we are and how we will be to one another.” The History of Tears runs until Jan. 25, 2027.