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Lot Essay
“I work with pictures and words because they have the ability to determine who we are, what we want to be and who we become”--Barbara Kruger
As one of Barbara Kruger’s most iconic and celebrated images, few works in the pantheon of late twentieth-century conceptual art are as instantly recognizable as Untitled (You Are Not Yourself). Executed in 1983, during the formative years of Kruger’s signature text-and-image aesthetic, this powerful composition embodies the artist’s lifelong interrogation of power, identity, and the mechanisms of visual culture. One of only two versions of the image ever made (and with the other belonging to Glenstone), this is perhaps the only opportunity to acquire an image now engrained into both Feminist and Postmodern artistic education. At its center is a black-and-white photograph of a woman before a shattered mirror—her face fragmented, her gaze obscured. The composition is overlaid with splintered text and encased in a red frame, both of which have become part Kruger’s iconic visual signature. Superimposed in the artist’s trademark Futura Bold Oblique font—the application of which has come to define and influence swathes of graphic design and fashion throughout our culture—are the words: “You are not yourself.” They hover with beguiling clarity, both dramatic and sensual.
The power of the work lies in its immediacy. In a single glance, Kruger captures a moment of psychological intensity that is at once intensely personal and culturally pervasive. The woman’s fractured reflection evokes the collapse of a unified self, the splintering of identity under the weight of societal expectations and internalized ideals. But this is not simply a portrait of individual disorientation. By presenting the message in the second person, Kruger directly implicates the viewer. This is not her fragmentation alone; it is yours, and in essence it’s ours. The effect is uniting, a twenty-first century battle cry. Where traditional portraiture seeks to establish a connection between subject and viewer, Kruger’s work enacts to educate us all to the artifice of the roles we inhabit and the identities we project. The mirror, conventionally a symbol of self-awareness, here becomes a site of community observation and consideration.
In You Are Not Yourself, Kruger has quite deliberately employed fragmentation to interrogate the construction of identity within our image-saturated culture. “I was a picture editor [at Condé Nast], looking at the models, the clothes, the bodies, the market economy of merchandise, and how bodies are part of that merchandise,” Kruger has explained. “On some level, there should be a recognition of power, of what it means to point the camera at another person… Generations of street photographers and photojournalists have looked for the most horrific events, the most divine oddities, the most ‘other’ others. I think much of image ‘capturing’ carries with it the possibility, if not inevitability, of exploitation” (B. Kruger interview with R. Pankova and K. Barrow, “Feels Like Life: An Interview with Barbara Kruger,” The Drift, 2022). The disintegration of this self-image becomes a potent metaphor for the ways in which mass media—particularly the entertainment industry—enforces prescriptive ideals upon women.
Through a critical feminist lens, You Are Not Yourself has dissected the mechanisms by which feminine identity is produced, circulated, and consumed. The figure here becomes not an individual, but a site of ideological inscription. Hollywood, as both a cultural engine and a symbol of aspirational fantasy, emerges as a central referent in this critique. Its power to manufacture desire, and project idealized narratives, contributes to the erosion of authenticity. It compels women to inhabit roles rather than inhabit themselves. “I see my work as a series of attempts to ruin certain representations, to displace the subject and to welcome a female spectator into the audience of men,” she has stated (B. Kruger, in "Review: Barbara Kruger, Art of Representation”, Woman's Art Journal, vol. 8, no. 1, Spring-Summer 1987, p. 40.) Kruger’s progressive practice has perhaps never been so successful as the present work. Exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Art Center and The Hammer Museum, it is an image which circulates in educational and institutional publications the world over, and which will continue to inspire the next generation of creators.
As one of Barbara Kruger’s most iconic and celebrated images, few works in the pantheon of late twentieth-century conceptual art are as instantly recognizable as Untitled (You Are Not Yourself). Executed in 1983, during the formative years of Kruger’s signature text-and-image aesthetic, this powerful composition embodies the artist’s lifelong interrogation of power, identity, and the mechanisms of visual culture. One of only two versions of the image ever made (and with the other belonging to Glenstone), this is perhaps the only opportunity to acquire an image now engrained into both Feminist and Postmodern artistic education. At its center is a black-and-white photograph of a woman before a shattered mirror—her face fragmented, her gaze obscured. The composition is overlaid with splintered text and encased in a red frame, both of which have become part Kruger’s iconic visual signature. Superimposed in the artist’s trademark Futura Bold Oblique font—the application of which has come to define and influence swathes of graphic design and fashion throughout our culture—are the words: “You are not yourself.” They hover with beguiling clarity, both dramatic and sensual.
The power of the work lies in its immediacy. In a single glance, Kruger captures a moment of psychological intensity that is at once intensely personal and culturally pervasive. The woman’s fractured reflection evokes the collapse of a unified self, the splintering of identity under the weight of societal expectations and internalized ideals. But this is not simply a portrait of individual disorientation. By presenting the message in the second person, Kruger directly implicates the viewer. This is not her fragmentation alone; it is yours, and in essence it’s ours. The effect is uniting, a twenty-first century battle cry. Where traditional portraiture seeks to establish a connection between subject and viewer, Kruger’s work enacts to educate us all to the artifice of the roles we inhabit and the identities we project. The mirror, conventionally a symbol of self-awareness, here becomes a site of community observation and consideration.
In You Are Not Yourself, Kruger has quite deliberately employed fragmentation to interrogate the construction of identity within our image-saturated culture. “I was a picture editor [at Condé Nast], looking at the models, the clothes, the bodies, the market economy of merchandise, and how bodies are part of that merchandise,” Kruger has explained. “On some level, there should be a recognition of power, of what it means to point the camera at another person… Generations of street photographers and photojournalists have looked for the most horrific events, the most divine oddities, the most ‘other’ others. I think much of image ‘capturing’ carries with it the possibility, if not inevitability, of exploitation” (B. Kruger interview with R. Pankova and K. Barrow, “Feels Like Life: An Interview with Barbara Kruger,” The Drift, 2022). The disintegration of this self-image becomes a potent metaphor for the ways in which mass media—particularly the entertainment industry—enforces prescriptive ideals upon women.
Through a critical feminist lens, You Are Not Yourself has dissected the mechanisms by which feminine identity is produced, circulated, and consumed. The figure here becomes not an individual, but a site of ideological inscription. Hollywood, as both a cultural engine and a symbol of aspirational fantasy, emerges as a central referent in this critique. Its power to manufacture desire, and project idealized narratives, contributes to the erosion of authenticity. It compels women to inhabit roles rather than inhabit themselves. “I see my work as a series of attempts to ruin certain representations, to displace the subject and to welcome a female spectator into the audience of men,” she has stated (B. Kruger, in "Review: Barbara Kruger, Art of Representation”, Woman's Art Journal, vol. 8, no. 1, Spring-Summer 1987, p. 40.) Kruger’s progressive practice has perhaps never been so successful as the present work. Exhibited at The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Walker Art Center and The Hammer Museum, it is an image which circulates in educational and institutional publications the world over, and which will continue to inspire the next generation of creators.