Sunrise

Sunset

A 30-second online art project:

Peter Burr, Sunshine Monument

Learn more

Learn more at whitney.org/artport

Skip to main content

Barbara Kruger

Untitled (Thinking of you)
1999–2000

Not on view

Date
1999–2000

Classification
Prints

Medium
Screenprint on vinyl

Dimensions
Overall: 123 1/8 × 100 11/16in. (312.7 × 255.7 cm)

Accession number
2000.217

Edition
Edition unknown

Credit line
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; purchase, with funds from the Katherine Schmidt Shubert Purchase Fund

Rights and reproductions
© Barbara Kruger
Courtesy, Mary Boone Gallery, New York

API
artworks/12926

Barbara Kruger’s iconic montages juxtapose images culled from the mass media with provocative slogans and phrases. Thinking of You features an enlarged close-up of a found photograph, showing a safety pin pricking an index finger, which is superimposed with the phrase “Thinking of You.” The message is delivered in Barbara Kruger’s preferred font, Futura Bold Italic, and contained in  her signature lacquered red frame—a bold, simplified composition that recalls the artist’s early career as a graphic designer. Typical here is the use of a shifting pronoun to replicate the media’s implication of the viewer into its web of insinuating messages. Like the safety pin, the tactic pricks at our sense of self-awareness as objects of media attention. Who is the “you” being addressed? The message implies intimacy and knowledge, but the image is somewhat menacing; is it a warning, and against what? Kruger’s art lifts the veil that conceals sublimated messages directed at our unconscious needs and desires, encouraging criticality and circumspection.



Have feedback about the Whitney's online collection? Send us a message.