Robert Indiana
"I was the least Pop of all the Pop artists."
Robert Clark (1928-2018), better known as Robert Indiana, was born in New Castle, Indiana is a “self-proclaimed American painter of signs.” After moving to New York City in 1954 and joining the pop art movement, Indiana began drawing on commercial art approaches blended with the idea of existentialism. Gradually this idea moved toward what Indiana calls “sculptural poems.” (Read More)
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In 1962, Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery hosted Robert Indiana’s first New York solo exhibition. He has since enjoyed solo exhibitions at over 30 museums and galleries worldwide. Indiana’s works are in the permanent collections of numerous museums, including MOMA, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, The Netherlands; Carnegie Institute, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington D.C.; Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania; and the Los Angeles County Museum, California; among many others.
Indiana’s work often consists of bold, simple, iconic images, especially numbers and short words like EAT, HUG, and, his best-known example, LOVE. His work explores the American identity and the power of abstraction and language. By using a written word as the central element of his work, Indiana created a legacy for all contemporary artists after him.
In 2008, Indiana created an image similar to his iconic LOVE (letters tacked two to a line, the letter “o” tilted on its side), but this time showcasing the word HOPE, and has donated all proceeds from the image went to the Democratic National Committee for Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. A stainless-steel sculpture of HOPE was unveiled outside Denver’s Pepsi Center during the 2008 Democratic National Convention.
SELECTED EXHIBITIONS
Important Exhibitions
2017 Robert Indiana: One Through Zero, The Glass House, New Canaan, Connecticut, USA
2015 Amor by Robert Indiana, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania, USA.
Apparitions: Frottages and Rubbings from 1960 to Now, Menil Collection, Houston, TX, USA
Take an Object, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
Picasso to Francis Bacon, Hangaram Art Museum, Seoul, South Korea
Pop Art Design, Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, Illinois, USA
2014 Robert Indiana’s Hartley Elegies, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas, USA
Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties, Brooklyn Museum, New York, NY, USA
Pop Art Prints, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C., USA
Liebe, Wilhelm-Hack-Museum, Ludwigshafen, Germany
Pop Art Myths, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid, Spain
Ludwig Goes Pop, Museum Moderne Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, Austria
2013 Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, NY, USA
Love Actually, Seoul Museum of Art, South Korea
All You Need is LOVE: From Chagall to Kusama and Hatsune Miku, Mori Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan
2009 Von Picasso bis Warhol, Künstlerschmuck der Avantgarde, Museum für Angewandte Kunst, Cologne, Germany
1998 Retrospective, Musée D’Art Moderne Contemporain, Nice, France
1982 Indiana: A 25 Year Retrospective of Paintings and Sculptures from the Collection of Robert Indiana, National Museum of Art, Smithsonian Institute, Washington D.C., USA
1978 Art About Art, Whitney Museum of Art, New York, USA
1975 American Art Since 1945, Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
1968 First one-man museum exhibition travels to the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA
1967 9th Sao Paulo Biennial, Sao Paulo, Brazil
1966 Annual Exhibition of Contemporary Sculpture, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA
1965 Word and Image, Guggenheim Museum, New York, USA
Annual Exhibition of American Paintings, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA
1963 Americans 1963, Museum of Modern Art, New York; Institute of Contemporary Art, Boston, Massachusetts, USA
Permanent Collections
Kaiser Wilhelm Museum, Krefeld, Germany
Stedelijk Museum, Schiedam, the Netherlands
Los Angeles County Museum, Los Angeles, California, USA
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, USA
Museum of Modern Art, New York, USA
San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco, California, USA
Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, Minnasota, USA
Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, USA