(American, b. September 13, 1928)
Robert Indiana is an American painter, sculptor and graphic artist associated with the Pop Art movement. Robert Indiana adopted the name of his native state as his artistic signature. His oeuvre has made cultural statements on American life in the 1950’s and 1960’s. Both his graphics and his paintings have evolved into hard-edged graphic images of words, logos and typographic forms, earning him a reputation as one of the country's leading contemporary artists.
Indiana started his artistic formation at the Herron School of Art in Indianapolis after having exhibited his watercolors[1] in 1942. Moving to New York State, he pursued his art study at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute in Utica. From there he went to the School of Art Institute of Chicago where he received a degree in 1953 and won a traveling fellowship to Europe. In 1954, he attended Edinburgh University and Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland.
In the mid 1950’s, Indiana settled in New York where he met Ellsworth Kelly, Jack Youngerman, James Rosenquist and Charles Hinnman. He soon joined the Pop Art movement and it was at this time that he began doing hard-edged paintings. The first ones were based on the doubled form of the ginkgo leaf, a motif that continued for several years. His early Pop work was inspired by traffic signs, automatic amusement machines, commercial stencils and old trade names.
Robert Indiana
Love
Lithograph
24 x 20
1996
Indiana said: "There have been many American SIGN painters, but there never were any American sign PAINTERS." Indiana has taken the everyday symbols of roadside America and made them into vivid colors shapes. Working in with geometric pop art style, he incorporated into his oeuvre the visual techniques and motifs of commercial advertising, such as the use of strident color and oversized scale. His paintings and constructions often consists of bold and simple images, especially numbers and short words like "EAT", "HUG", and "LOVE". He also became known for silkscreen prints, posters and sculptures which took the word LOVE as their theme. In his best-known work, "The American Dream #1" (1961, Museum of Modern Art), his headlines "Take All" and "Tilt", represent Indiana's critical judgment of American values.
In 1961 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired a painting, and in 1966 his ‘LOVE show’ opened at the Stable Gallery, the start of a long association with the LOVE image which has been realized in many different media. In 1964 he collaborated with Andy Warhol on the film EAT and in the same year received his first public commission, a work for the exterior of the New York State Pavilion at the New York World's Fair -- a 20-foot EAT Sign. In 1967 he exhibited one of his few figurative works, Mother and Father (1963-67, collection of the artist), at the Ninth Sao Paulo Bienal, Brazil. In 1966, he exhibited in Düsseldorf, Eindhoven (Van Abbemuseum), Krefeld (Museum Haus Lange) and Stuttgart (Württembergische Kunstverein). In 1968, he was represented at the fourth Documenta in Kassel.
‘Indiana has been also a theatrical set and costume designer, such as the 1976 production by the Santa Fe Opera of Virgil Thomson’s The Mother of Us All, based on the life of suffragist Susan B. Anthony. After the September 11, 2001 attacks, Indiana produced a series of Peace Paintings, which were exhibited in New York in 2004.
[1] His early work is influenced by American Scene artists’ style.