HONG KONG.- Ben Brown Fine Arts is presenting an exhibition at the Hong Kong gallery of Robert Indiana sculpture and paintings.
Robert Indiana (1928-2018), one of the most influential and pioneering American artists since the 1960s, is celebrated for his unique contributions to the Pop art movement in which he embraced the power of language, colour and form, while harnessing the American identity and his own personal history, to produce one of the most iconic bodies of work of the 20th and 21st centuries.
After studying at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting in Maine, and the Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland, Indiana moved to New York in the mid-1950s, where upon encountering Ellsworth Kelly joined a community of artists, including Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist and Cy Twombly, living at the Manhattan seaport Coenties Slip. There Indiana created freestanding sculptural assemblages utilizing wooden ship masts, beams and other found remnants of the shipping trade and nearby warehouses, as well as 19th century brass stencils, that would come to inform his future body of work. His work featured in prominent gallery and museum exhibitions and collections around the world, his visual lexicon including numbers and various monosyllabic words such as ART, EAT, DIE and HUG.
Organized in collaboration with Morgan Art Foundation, the exhibition offers a comprehensive look at the artist's distinctive imagery and features a curated selection of LOVE and ART sculptures. Morgan Art Foundation worked with Robert Indiana from 1995 onward as the artist's exclusive partner for the authorized production, conservation, sale, and promotion of his sculpture series. Morgan Art Foundation remains dedicated to preserving Indiana's artistic legacy and deepening the appreciation for his work among scholars and the public, in close cooperation with the non-profit Star of Hope Foundation established by the artist to preserve his artistic legacy, maintain his home on Vinalhaven as a study centre, and promote education in the visual arts.
Also featured in the exhibition is a rare group of paintings from Indiana's 'Ginkgo Ài' series executed in 2006, on loan from the Star of Hope Foundation, which incorporate the double/or mirrored ginkgo leaf image Indiana first explored in 1957. The leaves of gingko, an ancient and revered species of tree native to China, offered a visual lexicon to the artist that reflected his environs in New York City and his deep fascination with the East, the double-gingko imagery symbolizing personal self-reflection and transmutation.
Indiana's artwork features in the collections of prestigious museums globally, including Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C.; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C.; Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Menil Collection, Houston; Tate Modern, London; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Museum Ludwig, Vienna; Art Museum of Ontario, Toronto; and Israel Museum, Jerusalem.
