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Robert Indiana

Robert Indiana has made of basic American iconography the most subtle and evocative resonance of color his time has seen. He has used the figure of language and number to echo endlessly the paradigms of human emotions and made "LOVE" an international sign of transcendent power. He is the most deftly Emersonian of our painters, the consummate signer of our human declaration.
— Robert Creeley, American poet and author

Robert Indiana (September 13, 1928 – May 19, 2018) was an American painter, sculptor, and printmaker who played a central role in the development of assemblage art, hard-edge painting, and Pop art. Indiana, a self-proclaimed "American painter of signs," created a highly original body of work that explores American identity, personal history, and the power of abstraction and language, establishing an important legacy that resonates in the work of many contemporary artists who make the written word a central element of their oeuvre.

Born Robert Clark in New Castle, IN, US he spent his childhood moving frequently throughout his namesake state. After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting in Maine, and the Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland, Indiana moved to New York, where in 1956 he took up residence in Coenties Slip, joining a community of artists that included Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, and Jack Youngerman.

Scavenging the area's abandoned warehouses for materials, Indiana created sculptural assemblages from old wooden beams, rusted metal wheels, and other remnants of the shipping trade — freestanding constructions he called "herms" — while the discovery of nineteenth-century brass stencils led to the incorporation of brightly colored numbers and short emotionally charged words into his work, becoming the basis of his new painterly vocabulary.

Indiana quickly gained repute as one of the most creative artists of his generation, and was featured in influential New York shows such as 'New Media—New Forms' at the Martha Jackson Gallery (1960), 'Art of Assemblage' at the Museum of Modern Art (1961), and the 'International Exhibition of the New Realists' at the Sidney Janis Gallery (1962). In 1961, the Museum of Modern Art acquired The American Dream, I (1960–61), establishing Indiana as one of the most significant members of the new generation of Pop artists. Although acknowledged as a leader of Pop, Indiana distinguished himself from his peers by addressing important social and political issues and incorporating profound historical and literary references into his works. In 1964 he accepted Philip Johnson's invitation to design a new work for the New York State Pavilion at the New York World's Fair, creating a twenty-foot EAT sign composed of flashing lights, and collaborated with Andy Warhol on the film Eat.

1966 marked a turning point in Indiana's career with the success of his LOVE image. The word love, a theme central to Indiana's work, first appeared in the painting 4-Star Love (1961). Indiana's LOVE, selected by the Museum of Modern Art in 1965 for its Christmas card, quickly permeated wider popular culture and was adopted as an emblem of the "Love Generation." Appearing on a best-selling United States Postal Service stamp (1973), the image has become an icon of modern art. The universality of the subject is further evidenced by Indiana's translation of LOVE into AHAVA (Hebrew) and AMOR (Spanish).

In 1978, Indiana chose to remove himself from the New York art world. He settled on the remote island of Vinalhaven in Maine, moving into the Star of Hope, a Victorian building that had previously served as an Odd Fellows Lodge. There he worked on a suite of eighteen large-scale paintings known as The Hartley Elegies (1989–94), inspired by the German Officer paintings of Marsden Hartley, and returned to his seminal American Dream series, completing The Ninth American Dream in 2001.

In addition to being a painter and sculptor, Indiana created a significant number of prints, among them the Numbers Portfolio (1968), a collaboration with the poet Robert Creeley, as well as the poster for the opening of the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center (1964), and the poster for the opening exhibition of the Hirshhorn Museum of Art (1974). He also designed the stage sets and costumes for the Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein opera The Mother of Us All, presented in 1967 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis.

In 2013 the Whitney Museum of American Art hosted the artist's first New York retrospective, 'Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE', curated by Barbara Haskell. Indiana passed away in his home on May 19, 2018. Since his passing, exhibitions of his work have been mounted at the Contemporary Art Foundation in Tokyo, Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the United Kingdom, and other international art spaces.

His work is represented in the permanent collections of important museums worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, US; the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC, US; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, NY, US; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, CA, US; the Menil Collection, Houston, TX, US; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne, Germany; the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands; MUMOK (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien), Vienna, Austria; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel, among others.

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