Robert Indiana ONE Through ZERO (The Ten Numbers)

Installed in the south meadow of the Parrish Art Museum, ONE Through ZERO (The Ten Numbers) is an example of Robert Indiana’s (American, 1928-2018) long-held fascination with the power of numbers, a subject which stands as one of his most important iconographic themes. Indiana credited his enduring interest in numbers to the formative experience of moving households multiple times as a child, having lived in twenty-one different homes by the age of seventeen. He emphasized the variety of meanings and associations that numbers can generate, and each number had specific personal resonance for him, related either to events in his own life (such as highway routes and buildings where he lived), or to the cycle of life itself, with the number one representing birth, and the number zero standing for death.

One of the preeminent figures in American art since the 1960s, Indiana 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.