Piper completed the thirty-five parts of The Barbie Doll Drawings while still in her teens, at the start of her transition
from figurative drawing to conceptualism. In each drawing a doll has been de- and reconstructed, its body parts rendered
in exaggerated and contrasting scales and assembled in anatomically incorrect configurations, with a puppet-like quality that suggests the acerbic humor that marked Piper’s shifting perspective on the figure.
Gallery label from Adrian Piper: A Synthesis of Intuitions, 1965–2016, 2018