Barbara Kruger

Metro Pictures, New York

Private Collection, London

Simon Lee Gallery, London

Acquired directly from the above by the present owner

Venice, XL Esposizione Internazionale D'Arte, Biennale di Venezia: Aperto, 1982

London, Institute of Contemporary Art; Bristol, Watershed; Villeurbanne, Nouveau Musée; Basel, Kunsthalle Basel, Barbara Kruger: We Won't Play Nature to Your Culture, 1983-84, p. 32, illustrated in colour

London, Tate Modern, Tate Modern: Collection 2003, History, Memory, Society, 2003

Colour: The colours in the catalogue are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is wear to the frame in places, notably the corners. There are a few media accretions to the central white strip.
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Since the 1970s, Barbara Kruger’s work has consistently challenged social, political and sexual boundaries whilst encouraging viewers to question traditional socio-cultural concepts. Combining commercial advertising techniques with photo collage constructed by ‘found’ pictures, Kruger utilises concise, evocative wording to imbue her works with a multiplicity of meaning, leading to an often powerful disjunction between lexicographical implication and image.  The artist worked as a graphic designer for Mademoiselle magazine during the late 1960s, and the visually arresting conflation of image and text within her work has been strongly inspired by her advertising experiences during this time. The composition of Untitled (Your Devotion has the Look of a Lunatic Sport) is dramatically bisected by a vertical white line in which a portion of the text is contained, reminiscent of advertising banners and magazine layout. Kruger defined her distinctive practice in 1981, claiming that it was “To question the seemingly natural appearance of images through the textual commentary which accompanies them” (the artist cited in: Hal Foster et. al., Barbara Kruger, New York, 2010, p. 18).

Untitled (Your Devotion has the Look of a Lunatic Sport) is a significant example of Kruger’s practice during the early 1980s, and boasts a distinguished exhibition history; having been shown at the Venice Biennale in 1982 as well as The Institute of Contemporary Art and the Tate Gallery in London in 1983 and 2003 respectively. Here, a detailed image of veined, marked hands tied at the wrists - seemingly belonging to a Medieval or Renaissance sculptural source - is accompanied by text loaded with religious implications. Significantly, Kruger returned to the motif of hands at a later stage of her career when asked in 2003 to execute a large-scale commission within the sanctified space of St. Peter’s Church in Cologne. Clasped in prayer on this occasion rather than roped together, in each case, the expressive gestures of the hands convey a highly emotive message even if purposefully inconclusive. In Untitled (Your Devotion has the Look of a Lunatic Sport), the bound hands arguably recall the sufferings of a martyred Christ, whilst when invested with Kruger’s distinctive dialectic, the phrase seems to mock religious pretensions, with the bound hands taking on yet another level of significance as an ostensible indicator of the artist’s opinion concerning religious conformity and orthodoxy. In its thought-provoking message and highly symbolic use of an image, Untitled (Your Devotion has the Look of a Lunatic Sport) eloquently distils the quintessence of Kruger’s practice and concerns.