Please note: each work measures 32 1/4 x 21 3/4 inches.

The works produced as part of Jenny Holzer's "Truisms" series are some of her best-known and most celebrated. Beginning in 1977, while Holzer was still a student, she began writing collections of aphorisms, slogans, innocuous clichés and clever one-liners, producing lines of text that numbered in the hundreds. Listed in alphabetical order, these were printed on sheets of inexpensive paper and plastered on the buildings, walls, and public spaces around New York City, recalling the direct and universalizing—but ultimately disposable—messaging of advertising copy and billboards. In 1982, Holzer was invited by Toronto's A Space Gallery to stage one of these public interventions. Working with students at OCAD, these truisms were posted across the city. Rendered with clarity and humour, the compelling but ephemeral messaging of Holzer's one-liners become a subversive conflation of the personal and the political.