American
b. 1928, New Castle, Indiana
Lives and works in New York, New York

Robert Indiana, a preeminent figure in American art in the 1960s, has played a central role in the development of hard-edge painting and Pop Art. A self proclaimed American painter of signs, Indiana has created a highly original body of work that explores American identity, personal history and the power of abstraction and language, thus establishing an important legacy that resonates in the work of many contemporary artists who make the written word a central element of their oeuvre. He is particularly known for his Love prints and sculptures. A large sculptural version is located in the Sculpture Garden of the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Indiana distinguished himself from his Pop peers by addressing important social and political issues and incorporating profound historical and literary references into his works. In 1964 Indiana 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 20-foot EAT sign composed of flashing lights, and collaborated with Andy Warhol on the film Eat, a silent portrait of Indiana eating a mushroom in his Manhattan studio.

1966 marked a turning point in Indiana’s career with the success of his LOVE image, a continuing theme central to his work. The image’s popularity importantly emphasizes its great resonance with large and diverse audiences and has become an icon of modern art. The universality of the subject, to which Indiana continues to return, is further evidenced by his translation of LOVE into AHAVA (Hebrew) and AMOR (Spanish).

In addition to being a painter and sculptor, Indiana has created a significant number of prints, among them the Numbers Portfolio (1968), as well as many other works of graphic art, including 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 designed the stage sets and costumes for the Virgil Thompson and Gertrude Stein opera The Mother of Us All, which was presented in 1967 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and expanded in 1976 for the Santa Fe Opera in honor of the Bicentennial.

Robert Indiana’s artwork has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, and his works are in the permanent collections of important museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, DC; the Ablright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, California; the Menil Collection in Houston, Texas; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Minnesota; and many other major art museums around the world.