Biography of Robert Indiana
Robert Indiana (born 1928 in New Castle, Indiana, U.S.) is one of the key figures of the Pop Art movement in America, most famous for his iconic LOVE image. With its stacked letters and angled O, the image has been adapted into large scale steal sculptures that have been exhibited throughout the world, and even made into a U.S. postage stamp in 1973.
In 1954, after attending art schools around the US and in Scotland, the artist Robert Indiana moved to New York where he joined a community of artists including Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, and James Rosenquist. At this point in his career, Indiana’s work consisted essentially of hard edge paintings, a technique which involved experimentation geometric shapes and abrupt transitions between color areas. This is an aesthetic which would recur throughout his work. It was also in this period that Indiana contributed to the development of the assemblage art movement, as he scavenged studios and abandoned industrial factories in Manhattan for materials to create sculptural assemblages from rusty wheels, wooden beams, and miscellaneous remnants. Once Indiana had discovered brass stencils, he began incorporating numbers and words into his works, finding his own distinctive style and cementing his lasting fame.
Robert Indiana’s enormous body of work consisting of numerous editions and multiples, has been exhibited in countless international solo and group exhibitions. His works are in the permanent collections of important art institutions such as the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the National Gallery of Art in London, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, and the Shanghai Art Museum among others. In September 2013, the Whitney Museum of American Art hosted Indiana’s first ever New York retrospective, Robert Indiana: Beyond Love, which then travelled to the McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas. In 2014 the Indianapolis Museum of Art hosted an exhibition dedicated to his original graphic prints. In May 2011, one of Indiana’s LOVE sculptures sold for USD 4.1 million in auction.
