NEW YORK, NY.- Robert Indiana’s Decade: Autoportrait series presents a group of symbolic self-portraits layered with a multitude of references that form a poetic retrospective of his life during the 1960s. The 1960s was a decade of significant political and ideological upheaval. It was also the period during which Indiana settled upon themes that became central to his oeuvre, building his mature body of work alongside active participation in matters of social justice. The decade solidified Indiana’s belief, which he held deeply, that artists have a critical place in political dialogue and that art can act as a force for change.
By titling these works “Autoportraits,” Indiana plays on the word “self-portrait,” infusing it with references to his childhood growing up in Indiana, where the automobile played a significant role, both as one of the major industrial products of the area and as the vehicle that helped shape his view of the culture of the American highways.
Many of the personal references in the works manifest in Indiana’s dramatic use of contrasting colors—an impetus that was influenced by his relationship with Ellsworth Kelly. In the numerically sequential Decade: Autoportraits, vivid greens, blues, yellows, reds, and whites are also distinctly associated with the various stages of life from birth, infancy, youth, and adolescence to the autumn of life, and ultimately the end of the cycle. The Autoportraits also include references to historic figures from the period such as John F. Kennedy, Alfred Barr, and Martin Luther King.
Robert Indiana (1928–2018) is a major figure of post-war American art. Drawing his subject matter from the visual vernacular of highway road signs, factory die-cut stencils, and commercial logos, Indiana was influenced, in part, by the alternative zeitgeist of the rising generation of artists in late 1950s New York. Whilst Abstract Expressionism was flourishing uptown, he developed a burgeoning interest for a different kind of art in Lower Manhattan’s deserted shipping lofts at Coenties Slip. In his waterfront studio there, surrounded by relics of the old seaport including shipping equipment and metal stencils for signage from the seafaring days, Indiana began to incorporate the language and symbols that would become his signature elements. These new forms tapped into the American experience in a mode both immediate and poetic and further built upon questions of national identity as propositioned by American modernists such as Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley and Edward Hopper—all of whom transformed the vernacular, including industrial sources, into fine art.
