ROBERT INDIANA | ART (Red)

Morgan Art Foundation Ltd., New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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Blending a high-impact graphic vocabulary together with hard-edge line and pure colour, ART combines several of Robert Indiana’s signature stylistic features while heralding a distinctly new direction in his artistic output. The complexity of the three-dimensional form of the present work is arresting and possesses a distinct architectural quality. Returning to his preliminary interest in three-letter words such as ‘DIE’ and ‘EAT’ which characterised his sculptural ‘one-word poems’ of the early 1960s, Indiana revisits the potential of language to signify an infinite range of meaning. Indiana applies the semiotic theory of philosopher C.S. Pierce to explore the ability of a word with a seemingly universal meaning like ‘art’ to shift based on the cultural background of the interpreter. The artist himself has imbued the work with his own set of personal associations with this work by coating the work in cherry red as an homage to the logo of Phillips 66 gasoline company where his father worked during the Great Depression. Despite its outwardly straightforward message, ART is revealed to be deeply anchored in the life of the artist. Born Robert Clark, Indiana took his native state’s name after moving to New York in 1954 in a gesture that foreshadowed his fixation with Americana. Throughout his career, Indiana was preoccupied by the role of the sign in American culture and its ability to represent intangible desires and meanings through reduced and accessible language. Indiana spent much of his childhood on the road moving from town to town where the road signs which lined the motorways of his youth were his constant companions. The artist has famously reflected how “In Europe trees grow everywhere; in America, signs grow like trees; signs are more common than trees” (Robert Indiana cited in: Joachim Pissarro, 'Signs into art', in: Simon Salama-Caro et al., Robert Indiana, New York 2006, p. 59). By invoking these signs in his sculptures, Indiana created shrines to the achievements of our contemporary age.

Indiana’s ART made its sculptural debut at his 1972 solo exhibition at the Denise René Gallery in New York. This was to be his first solo exhibition in the city since the 1966 LOVE show at the Stable Gallery which launched him into the New York art scene. Like many of his sculptural designs, ART was first developed as a poster design for the exhibition American Art Since 1960 at the Princeton University of Art Museum. Drifting between planes of legibility and abstraction, it becomes clear why ART accepts its sculptural form as the culmination of a series that spans a range of media. Indiana’s work is celebrated today as a monument to commercial mass-consumer culture whose artistic innovations continue to inspire subsequent generation of artists.