Amor (Red Blue) is an iconic example from Robert Indiana’s most celebrated body of work. First conceived in 1965 as a Christmas card design commissioned by the Museum of Modern Art, New York, Indiana’s LOVE works have since become an instantly recognizable iconographic phenomenon. Testament to the significance of the series within the artist’s oeuvre, versions of LOVE are housed in esteemed institutional collections globally such as the The Whitney Museum of American Art, New York and the Tate Modern in London, while others occupy prominent public spaces such as Manhattan’s Sixth Avenue and Riyadh’s King Abdullah Financial District Metro Station.
An emblem of the 1960s idealism, Indiana’s masterful graphics align with the giants of Pop art such as Ed Ruscha and Roy Lichtenstein, embracing ideas of repetition and seriality that came to define the era. In this particular iteration cast in an edition of 6, Indiana uses an expressive red for the outer surface and a bright blue for the inside, the graphic color and bold typeface perhaps emblematic of the ubiquitous signs across the US Interstate Highway. Having grown up moving from town to town until the age of seventeen, the artist has often explained how important signs and their aesthetics were to his practice: “In Europe trees grow everywhere; in America, signs grow like trees; signs are more common than trees.” (the artist quoted in: Joachim Pissarro, “Signs Into Art,” in: Simon Salama-Caro, Robert Indiana, New York, 2006, p. 59) In AMOR (Red Blue), Indiana distills the complex intertwinings of a commercial visual vocabulary, transcendental concepts of spirituality, and personal history into an elegant sculptural form.
“Know that the LOVE I speak of is spiritual.”
AMOR extends the spirit of his LOVE sculpture into a new language, a new territory, proving that Indiana’s sculptures are not just symbols of America, but of the world. Over the course of his career, Indiana experimented with LOVE in numerous languages including Spanish, Chinese, Hebrew and Sanskrit. Rendering each version with his instantly identifiable style serves to further abstract the word itself, asking us to push beyond its physical presentation and consider the deeper meaning.
“In a sense… I got down to the subject matter of my work… The subject is defined by its expression in the word itself… Love is purely a skeleton of all that word has meant in all the erotic and religious aspects of the theme, and to bring it down to the actual structure of the calligraphy [is to reduce it] to the bare bones”
Looking at the ways graphic letters and numbers acquire beauty as shapes and silhouettes when separated from their meaning, AMOR brings to focus the weight, balance and shape of each letter as they are neatly stacked on top of each other in a bold topographical design. The expressive red is used here not just for its symbolic association with love and passion but, when combined with Indiana’s typeface, graphic design and simplified stacked format, to communicate the universal emotion tied to a single word in an immediate and direct way, becoming an icon of contemporary art in the process.
Throughout his career, Indiana was fascinated by the potential of symbols and signs; his LOVE sculptures and paintings, in this sense, are the artist’s explorations of semantic possibilities. As Carl J. Weinhardt argues, Indiana’s practice elevates the word to new graphic and semiotic potential: “When [Indiana] carried some of the words (and eventually the numerals) that occupied him as a painter (LOVE, ART) into the sculptural dimension, he became literally a wordsmith, fashioning the logos in metal.” (Theresa Brakely, ed., Robert Indiana, New York, 1990, pp. 9-10.) Through AMOR (Red Blue), Indiana merges the loftiness of love with the physicality of metal, presenting the word “AMOR” in its multifaceted possibilities and beckoning viewers to unlock the myriad meanings behind it. Even devoid of any kind of anchoring context, AMOR (Red Blue) takes on the combination of sinuous curves, sharp lines, and the playfully tilted oblong form of the letter “O” to create an object that exudes a sense of exquisite grace despite its material solidity.
RIGHT: Ellsworth Kelly, Blue Red, 1964. Detroit Institute of Arts. Art © 2025 Ellsworth Kelly.
Indiana’s robust dialogue with art historical contemporaries is evident in his iconic composition and arrangement of the letters; the hard-edge surfaces with vibrant chromatic combinations invoke the practice of former partner Ellsworth Kelly, while the interrogation of semantics and text hint at the works of West Coast Pop artists like Ed Ruscha. Along with these diverse influences, Indiana himself has pointed to his upbringing as a pivotal inspiration behind his series of LOVE sculptures and paintings: “When I was a child I was exposed to and involved in the Christian Science church, and all Christian Science churches have no decoration whatsoever, no stained glass windows, no carvings, no paintings, and, in fact, only one thing appears in a Christian Science church, and that’s a small, very tasteful inscription in gold, usually, over the platform where the readers conduct the service. And that inscription is God Is Love.” (the artist quoted in: Exh. Cat., Buffalo, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Robert Indiana: A Sculpture Retrospective, 2018, p. 85) At once in dialogue with art history, with the cultural zeitgeist, and with religious profundity, Amor (Red Blue) remains immensely powerful as a timeless symbol of a movingly universal ideal.
