Robert Indiana

Creator of the iconic LOVE sculpture and image, Robert Indiana was a great proponent of the Pop movement. Born Robert Clark in 1928 in New Castle, Indiana, he later adopted the name of his home state as his last name, becoming Robert Indiana. Indiana attended the Art Institute of Chicago, followed by the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine and the Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland. He moved to New York City in 1954, where he became part of the burgeoning Pop art scene alongside contemporaries such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein.

Indiana’s commitment to language as sign and identity was drawn from New York art of the 1950s, in which words were appropriated in much assemblage works and their performative versions, environments and happening. Indiana’s interaction with language, its letter and symbols as abstractions began in the late 1950s. He discovered a set of die-cut stencils and appropriated them for early works, which he called ‘herms’, after the classical Greek pillars which once represented Hermes, the messenger god of Greek mythology. The conception of these works was inspired by his loft-mates Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin and Jack Youngerman. The stencilling on Indiana’s headless wooden beams prefigures his later reductions to letters or numbers alone.

The LOVE sculptures and paintings catapulted Indiana to fame. Having seen the word ‘love’ in multiple guises, written in Christian Science books, imprinted on the spare walls of his church, the artist spent decades thinking through its possible meanings. Artistically first conceived in 1958 as a shaped poem after Apollinaire and other early Modernists, including Gertrude Stein, Indiana stacked VE over LO, the O canted slyly to one side. Eight years on, Indiana transposed this configuration to a block of aluminium, carved out for the Stable Gallery (1966). A request from the Museum of Modern Art to use the artwork for Christmas cards followed shortly. In 2011 Christie’s sold Indiana’s Love Red/Blue (1990) for US$4,114,500 — a world auction record for the artist.

Indiana’s exploration of simple, bold imagery continued with works like HOPE, created in 2008 as a symbol of optimism and a call for political change during Barack Obama’s presidential campaign. Beyond these iconic works, Indiana’s broader oeuvre includes a variety of pieces that address themes of American identity, history and politics. His EAT/DIE paintings and the Numbers series are examples of his engagement with textual and numerical imagery, reflecting his fascination with language and symbols.

Despite his fame, Indiana remained somewhat reclusive, residing in a converted Odd Fellows Lodge on Vinalhaven, an island off the coast of Maine, from the late 1970s until his death in 2018. His works have been widely exhibition and are part of museum collections worldwide.