Painter, scene artist and costume designer, Robert Indiana (born 1928, Indiana, USA) has always been associated with Pop Art. With his Love piece, Robert Indiana is one of those rare artists who succeeded in creating a universally recognized motif.
Painter, scene artist, and costume designer, Robert Indiana has always been associated with Pop Art. With his Love piece, Robert Indiana, real name Robert Clark (1928-2018) is one of those rare artists who can boast of having created a universally recognized motif. After studying in various American art schools as well as Edinburgh College of Art and in London, Robert Indiana traveled throughout Mexico, Europe, and the United States before settling in New York in 1954. In 1962 he took part in the exhibition “New Realists” which gathered together a large number of the international artists associated with the Pop Art movement. A key artist of this movement, Indiana is part of the second wave of American Pop artists, after Rauschenberg, Johns, Chamberlain, and others. An admirer of Edward Hopper and the painter Charles Demuth, Robert Indiana became fascinated by graphic signs very early on. In the early ‘sixties, he developed his characteristically vibrant, colorful style encompassing letters, words, and numbers. Created during the war in Vietnam, his celebrated work LOVE with the slanted O was originally associated with the peace movement before becoming a Pop Art icon. The artist was to make steady and obsessive use of it, invading the world and reducing its impact in sculptures, stamps, silk-screens, and carpets.

Robert Indiana

Robert Indiana is most famous for his iconic “LOVE” image, which has appeared across media including sculptures, prints, and paintings and epitomizes the artist’s graphic, predominantly text-based Pop art practice.

With this particular four-letter arrangement of L.O.V.E, Robert Indiana has created an image so powerful that it has been adopted all over the world. A pop image, with its mix of the top and bottom lines is now presented in the form of the hand-woven wool tapestry.

MoMA historian Deborah Wye has said that "[T]he word love was connected to Indiana´s childhood experiences attending a Christian Science church, where the only decoration was the wall inscription "God is Love". The colors were an homage to his father, who worked at a Phillips 66 gas station during the Depression" and "the red and green of that sign against the blue Hoosier sky. Love is "full of erotic, religious, autobiographical, and political underpinnings - both accessible and complex in meaning.

Indiana has said: "Some people like to paint trees. I like to paint love. I find it more meaningful than painting trees."
Created in its existing form as a Christmas card to be sent by the MoMA in 1964, the motif continues to be so successful that the artist has revived it in a variety of forms. Robert Indiana created "Love", a monumental sculpture found at Love Park in Philadelphia. Many other towns across the globe have since made it famous: New York, Madrid, Singapore, Taipei, Shanghai, Montreal. In 1973 a US postage stamp revived the composition and 320 million copies were circulated. The art and message of Indiana's Love chimes with the definition given by the artist about the Pop Art movement: “Pop Art is the American Dream, optimistic, generous and naïve!”

Show all results