Robert Indiana

Robert Indiana 1928 New Castle/Indiana - 2018 Vinalhaven/Maine The American artist Robert Indiana was born on September 13, 1928 as Robert Earl Clark in New Castle in the state of Indiana; he added the name of his home state to his artist name in 1959, so that he went down in art history as Robert Indiana and as one of the most successful and distinctive artists of Pop Art as well as Signal Art. In the fall of 1949, Robert Indiana began studying at the School of the Art Institute in Chicago, and in 1953 he transferred to the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine on a scholarship. Another scholarship enables Robert Indiana to attend the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, where he studies English literature, philosophy and botany. In 1954 Robert Indiana returned to the USA and moved to New York. Briefly working in an art shop on 57th Street, he quickly came into contact with artists such as Alex Katz, James Rosenquist, Ellsworth Kelly, Cy Twombly and others; his loft was across the street from Willem de Kooning's studio. "An American Painter painting an American theme" Robert Indiana's art begins in the late 1950s with sculptures he assembles from weathered wooden beams and rusty wheels or pieces of metal and prints with stenciled letters, numbers, arrows as well as other clear motifs. This early sculptural group of works, the "Herms," already shows Robert Indiana's preference for clear forms, strong colors, and his sensitive feeling for the graphic design and expressiveness of short, concise words. Around 1960 he created hard-edge paintings influenced by Ellsworth Kelly, with whom he was in a relationship, such as the series "The sweet mystery" with double forms resembling gingko leaves, and in 1961 the first of the "American Dream" paintings, which was purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the same year. Robert Indiana becomes famous for his word paintings, prints and sculptures. From 1971 dates the series "Decade: Autoportrait" with superimposed forms, color planes, words and numbers. In a highly original way, Robert Indiana is searching for the American identity of his time, his personal history. He uses a powerful, striking abstraction. The subtext of his paintings conveys content through letters, short words, numbers and signs that allude to personal, historical or political events. LOVE - Art and Word Poem Letters and also numbers as well as color contrasts in sharply outlined color fields play an essential role in Robert Indiana's extensive oeuvre. The four letters of the word "LOVE" arranged in a square with a slightly tilted O are of such high expressiveness and such high recognition value that this emblematic motif, which Robert Indiana has designed again and again differently both as a painting and in silkscreen and as a sculpture, has been ubiquitous in the world since its creation in the early 1960s and it is impossible to imagine life without it; as a Pop Art icon, it has probably become even more popular than its creator. "LOVE" adorns the Christmas card of the Museum of Modern Art in 1965 and appears on a stamp of the US Postal Service in 1973. Robert Indiana himself describes his "LOVE" paintings as one-word poems. Other short, pithy words such as HUG, HOPE, EAT, DIE are used just as poetically, along with numbers that convey a meaning, such as the integrated numbers of American highways in the work "American Dream I" (1961). Pop Art in New York In the 1960s, Pop Art became the most important countermovement in New York to the American abstract expressionism that had dominated until then, and finally made New York the leading metropolis in the international art world. Robert Indiana's first solo exhibition was shown in 1962 by Eleanor Ward at the Stable Gallery in New York, where Andy Warhol also showed his first Pop Art paintings in the same year. Robert Indiana is friends with Andy Warhol and participates in Andy Warhol's 1963 experimental film "Kiss" and in 1964 as the main actor in the film "Eat". In 1966 the Stable Gallery showed another exhibition of Robert Indiana's works, "LOVE Show". The international breakthrough is documented by the 1966 exhibition at the Schmela Gallery in Düsseldorf. In 1968 Robert Indiana takes part in Documenta 4 in Kassel. The large-scale retrospective "Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE", which made the entire range of his oeuvre visible, was last dedicated to the artist in 2013/14 by the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York. Robert Indiana passed away on May 19, 2018 in Vinalhaven, Maine, where he had been living in seclusion since 1978.