Robert Indiana

Few images are more popular than Robert Indiana’s ‘LOVE’ design. Commercialised as a Valentine’s Day card by the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1965, the iconic image has appeared on prints, paintings, sculptures and stamps. Across his career, Indiana produced assemblages, prints, paintings and sculptures, dubbing himself a ‘painter of signs’. His original works explore American identity and history, while interrogating the potentials of signs and language. 

Indiana was born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana in 1928. After joining the US Army, he studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, where he first learned about printmaking. Subsequently, he enrolled in the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting in Maine and the Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland.

The artist adopted the pseudonym ‘Indiana’ after settling in New York in 1954, a clue to his continued interest in American culture and its language. His first artworks consisted of assemblages of scrap material and found objects to which he often added stencilled words. In 1956 he met Ellsworth Kelly who became his lover and mentor, introducing him to the vibrant New York art scene.

Indiana’s paintings of the 1960s combined abstract shapes, symbols and letters, often containing political and social subtexts. His series ‘The American Dream’ (1961) conveys, through symmetrical graphic designs borrowed from advertising, a critique of consumerism and political extremism. Other references to American culture and literature emerge in paintings such as ‘The Calumet’ (1961) and ‘Melville’ (1961), the stencilled words paying homage to American writers.

Indiana held his first solo exhibition in New York in 1962 before reaching international fame in 1966 thanks to his ‘LOVE’ design. Originally inspired by his painting ‘4-Star Love’ (1961), which displays a square made of four stars, the colourful image, consisting of the syllables ‘LO’ and ‘VE’ stacked on each other, was an instant success. Appropriated by pacifist movements, it became a United States Postal Service stamp in 1973. Subsequently, Indiana made versions in Hebrew, ‘AHAVA’ and Spanish, ‘AMOR’.

Alongside his production of paintings, sculptures and prints, Indiana explored theatrical set and costume design, collaborating in a production on the life of suffragist Susan B. Anthony by the Santa Fe Opera in 1976. He also dealt with unusual commissions such as designing the basketball court at the Milwaukee Exposition Convention Center Arena in 1977, with a large ‘M’ covering each half of the court. 

Indiana’s continued concern for social and political issues continually resurfaced throughout his career. Between the 1980s and 1990s he produced the painting series ‘Hartley Elegies’, geometrical combinations inspired by World War II shapes and visual motifs. After the traumatic terrorist attack of 9/11, he created a series of canvases titled ‘The Peace Paintings’ and in 2008 he reworked his iconic ‘LOVE’ into the word ‘HOPE’ in support of Barack Obama’s presidential campaign.

Robert Indiana died in 2018 in Vinalhaven, Maine. From the 1960s onward, his work has been showcased in solo and group exhibitions around the world, appearing also in the permanent collections of institutions like the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C. and the Tate Gallery in London. Indiana’s artistic legacy shows the power of language to shape reality and remains influential for contemporary artists also exploring the potentials of words, letters and signs.