Born in New Castle USA, 1928 - 2018
ROBERT INDIANA
Robert Indiana is an American painter, printmaker and sculptor best known for his LOVE series from the 1960s.
Born Robert Clark, Indiana adopted the name of the state in which he grew up. In his work, Indiana adapts the iconography of road signs, advertising posters and logos to create his Pop art icons.
Inspired by poetry as much as art, Indiana turns words into objects in a bid to simultaneously celebrate and question the American Dream and other myths. Indiana came to prominence in 1961, when the Museum of Modern Art in New York included him in its important Art of Assemblage exhibition of 1961.
Throughout the 1960s Indiana addressed issues of love and death through his sharp-edged, high-contrast art which deployed text both formally and linguistically. Indiana was also interested in the formal beauty and symbolic power of cardinal numbers.
During the Vietnam War, and subsequently the Iraq War, Indiana made a series of works inspired by the idiom of peace protests. Disillusioned with the New York art world, Indiana has lived and worked on the remote island of Vinalhaven, Maine, since 1978.
Robert Indiana studied at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, before moving to New York in 1954.
In 1961 the Museum of Modern Art, New York, acquired an Indiana painting, and the following year Indiana had his first solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery.
In 1966 Indiana’s 'LOVE show' opened at the Stable Gallery. The same year saw exhibitions in the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld and the Württembergische Kunstverein, Stuttgart.
He was represented at the Documenta, Kassel (1968). In 1998 a retrospective exhibition opened at the Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain, in Nice, solo exhibitions were held at the Paul Kasmin Gallery in New York (2003, 2004). The Whitney Museum of American Art is hosting a major retrospective of Indiana’s work in 2013-14.