We see the face of a young model, in profile and from the back, demonstrating an elaborate hairstyling system of curlers and clips and tinted according to the design-language of red, green and blue. In all-caps letters, the three panels consecutively announce NEVER, PERFECT, ENOUGH, invoking the lengths to which people go to attain society’s impossible ideals of perfection.

Among the woman's curlers and instructional arrows, Kruger overlays a stream of words that move free associatively from one to the next, with the viewer left to interpret connections between them.

The format of the appropriated image in tandem with the added text recalls the practice of phrenology, a nineteenth-century pseudoscience in which the shape and size of people's heads was thought to determine their character and mental abilities—and often used historically to argue for white supremacy and class distinctions. Kruger's triptych updates this urge to divide, categorize and control, situating these long-standing human pursuits squarely in the present while simultaneously picturing the connections between “beauty” and the punishing regimens that accompany it.

The artist refers to these objects as “paste-ups,” the term for cut-and-paste mockups used in the field of graphic design, which reflects Kruger's time as an editorial designer for Mademoiselle magazine and her work designing book jackets and picture editing in the late 1960s and 1970s. These small-scale collages were then enlarged and produced as large-format gelatin silver print and vinyl works—including iconic pieces such as Untitled (Business as usual) (1987), Untitled (Your gaze hits the side of my face) (1982), and Untitled (We don't need another hero) (1988), whose paste-ups are gathered here in a selection that shows the varying compositional strategies through which the artist manipulates text, image and the relationships between them.