A woman’s face, half shaded, tilts at an angle and generates a soft curve from the top to the bottom of the tall, framed panel. Crossing the bridge of her nose, Kruger’s text asks, in Futura Bold font: “Who is free to choose?” The work stems from a significant series of columnar panels—several of which were included in a 1990 exhibition at Monika Sprüth Gallery, Cologne—each presenting a powerful question with an equally evocative appropriated black-and-white image. The tall format recalls the shape of a window or mirror, opening up a space for contemplation and self-reflection in the face of the artist’s candid query.

Kruger created Untitled (Who is free to choose?) at a particularly fertile and memorable moment in her career. Her distinctive aesthetic already fully developed, she had recently made what would become two of her best-known works: Untitled (I shop therefore I am) (1987) and Untitled (Your body is a battleground) (1989). The latter had served as the basis for the equally historic poster that Kruger designed for the March on Washington in 1989 in support of legal abortion and women’s rights. Though the question “Who is free to choose?” is open-ended, and purposefully so, the concepts of freedom and choice that it raises undoubtedly evoke the long-standing debates around abortion and its legalization—a cause to which Kruger has contributed numerous powerful visual statements in the United States and internationally.

The notion of questioning has played a central role in Kruger’s work, not only in her critiques of consumerism, mass media and sociopolitical control, but also in her texts. For the first decade of her practice, the artist often incorporated phrases using “you” and “we,” directly addressing both herself and her viewers in a shared experience of contestation. Toward the late 1980s, however, Kruger introduced a series of questions into her repertoire of texts that would further emphasize the unfixed, flexible nature of her artistic statements. Another of the artist’s oft-illustrated works, Untitled (Are we having fun yet?) (1987), offers an early example of this new strategy.

At the same time, Kruger was also expanding the scale of her works as never before, including for her monumental project Untitled (Questions) (1990) on the facade of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles. This work, whose texts and colors produce the image of the American flag, includes the same question as Untitled (Who is free to choose?) among its many poignant phrases.