Biography

Robert Indiana was born in 1928 as Robert Clark, taking his home state for his name after moving to New York in 1954. Indiana studied printmaking at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago between 1949 and 1953, and there he soon realised his preference for screenprinting. Today, Indiana is best known for his contributions to the Pop Art movement in America, and his use of 20th century American iconography – logos, signs and adverts – in the creation of his own unique visual vocabulary.

Very few images are as widely recognisable as Indiana’s LOVE, as it has appeared in several forms including prints, paintings, sculptures, banners, tapestries and stamps. Indiana’s artworks demonstrate the artist’s fascination with the power that ordinary words can have when displayed boldly and with eye catching colouring. LOVE has taken on several different colour palettes and this notion of repeating a single image is best known through Andy Warhol’s series of Marylin screenprints from 1967, connecting Indiana strongly to the leading Pop artists of this time through their shared artistic practices and intensions.

Indiana’s work has featured in numerous important exhibitions in the last few decades, most notably the 2013 retrospective of the artist’s work at the Whitney Museum of American Art. Today his sculptures can be seen in public spaces in New York, Tokyo, London and several other cities around the world.