NEW YORK, NY.- Pace announced its global representation of The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative, the primary organization advocating for the achievement of the artist and maintaining a collection and archive of his work. At the vanguard of Pop art and assemblage, Robert Indiana made use of letters and numerals in his bold sculptures, paintings, and prints to explore American identity and iconography as well as the universal power of abstraction. Employing language and color as key materials for his works across media, Indiana called himself an “American painter of signs,” developing a uniquely graphic visual vocabulary that—imbued with literary, political, and spiritual import—made him one of the most inventive and enduring figures in the history of American art.

The artist will be the subject of a major presentation, Robert Indiana: The Sweet Mystery, a collateral event of the 60th International Art Exhibition – La Biennale di Venezia, presented at the Procuratie Vecchie in Piazza San Marco. Organized by Yorkshire Sculpture Park, developed with The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative, and curated by Matthew Lyons, this will be one of the most significant exhibitions of Indiana’s art in Italy to date, bringing together works spanning more than 60 years of his career.

Pace’s representation of works from The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative begins a new chapter in a long relationship between the gallery and the artist. In 1962, two years after Arne Glimcher founded Pace in Boston, he included Indiana’s paintings in Stock Up for the Holidays, a group exhibition he organized at the gallery’s original location on Newbury Street. As the first major presentation of Pop art in the United States outside New York, Stock Up for the Holidays introduced Boston to the burgeoning movement. Thirty years later, Indiana was featured in Pace’s 1993 group exhibition Coenties Slip in New York. Curated by Milly Glimcher, this show was named for the former port in New York City where a community of artists—including Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, and Jack Youngerman—lived and worked in the 1950s.

As with other important postwar estates and foundations in Pace’s program, including those of Martin, Robert Whitman, Claes Oldenburg, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Irwin, Sam Gilliam, Kenneth Noland, and Mark Rothko, the gallery will present exhibitions that delve into the periods and processes that made Indiana one of the most influential and important artists of his time.

Marc Glimcher, CEO of Pace Gallery, says: “Robert Indiana used language and color to convey universal messages of feeling and truth in his art. One of the central figures in the vibrant Coenties Slip scene, a hotbed of creativity and experimentation in New York during the postwar years, he proposed radical new modes of art making. Like Martin and the other artists in that community— which so many years later has taken on an almost mythic dimension—Indiana pursued a different kind of expression through his work, reshaping the history of art in that process. We’re thrilled to welcome the works held by The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative to our program, where they fit so seamlessly.”

Simon Salama-Caro, Founder of the Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative, says:
“The return of Robert Indiana’s work to Pace Gallery is a wonderful new moment in the art world’s evolving recognition of the achievement of this great artist, in all its depth and breadth. Beginning with the reappraisals of scholars such as Thomas Crow, Barbara Haskell, Joe Lin-Hill, and Robert Storr and the retrospective exhibitions Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Robert Indiana: Sculpture at the Albright-Knox, a new understanding has been building of both the formal brilliance of Indiana’s work and the complexity of its subject matter and emotions.”

One of the preeminent figures in American art since the 1960s, Robert Indiana played a central role in the development of assemblage art, hard-edge painting, and Pop art. Indiana, a self-proclaimed “American painter of signs,” created a highly original body of work that explores American identity, personal history, and the power of abstraction and language, establishing an important legacy that resonates in the work of many contemporary artists who make the written word a central element of their oeuvre.

Robert Indiana was born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana on September 13, 1928. Adopted as an infant, he spent his childhood moving frequently throughout his namesake state. His artistic talent was evident at an early age, and its recognition by a first-grade teacher informed his decision to become an artist. In 1942, Indiana moved to Indianapolis to attend Arsenal Technical High School, known for its strong arts curriculum. After graduating he spent three years in the U.S. Air Force and then studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting in Maine, and the Edinburgh College of Art in Scotland.

In 1956, two years after moving to New York, Indiana met Ellsworth Kelly, and upon his recommendation took up residence in Coenties Slip, once a major port on the southeast tip of Manhattan. There he joined a community of artists that would come to include Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, and Jack Youngerman. The environment of the Slip had a profound impact on Indiana’s work, and his early paintings include a series of hard-edge mirrored Ginkgo leaves inspired by the trees which grew in the nearby Jeannette Park. He also incorporated the ginkgo form into his 19- foot mural Stavrosis (1958), a crucifixion pieced together from forty-four sheets of paper that he found in his loft. It was upon completion of this work that Indiana adopted the name of his native state as his own.

Indiana, like some of his fellow artists, scavenged the area’s abandoned warehouses for materials, creating sculptural assemblages from old wooden beams, rusted metal wheels, and other remnants of the shipping trade that had thrived in Coenties Slip. While he made hanging works such as Marine Works (1960-62), Jeanne d’Arc (1960–62), and Wall of China (1960–61), the majority were freestanding constructions which Indiana called “herms,” after the sculptures that served as boundary markers at crossroads in ancient Greece and Rome. His discovery of 19th century brass stencils led to his incorporation of brightly colored numbers and short, emotionally charged words into these sculptures as well as canvases, and these symbols became the basis of his new painterly vocabulary.

Indiana quickly gained repute as one of the most creative artists of his generation, and he was featured in influential New York shows such as New Media—New Forms at the Martha Jackson Gallery (1960), Art of Assemblage at the Museum of Modern Art (1961), and the International Exhibition of the New Realists at the Sidney Janis Gallery (1962). In 1961, the Museum of Modern Art acquired The American Dream, I (1960–61), the first in a series of paintings exploring the illusory American Dream, establishing Indiana as one of the most significant members of the new generation of Pop artists who were eclipsing the prominent painters of the New York School.

Although acknowledged as a leader of Pop, Indiana distinguished himself from his peers by addressing important social and political issues and incorporating profound historical and literary references into his works. American literary references appear in paintings such as The Calumet (1961) and Melville (1961), exhibited in 1962 in Indiana’s first New York solo exhibition, held at Eleanor Ward’s Stable Gallery. In 1964, Indiana accepted Philip Johnson’s invitation to design a new work for the New York State Pavilion at the New York World’s Fair, creating a 20-foot EAT sign composed of flashing lights, and he also collaborated with Andy Warhol on the film Eat, a silent portrait of Indiana eating a mushroom in his Coenties Slip studio. His first European solo exhibition took place in 1966 at Galerie Schmela in Düsseldorf, Germany, featuring his Number paintings (1964–65), a series of works on a theme that he has explored in various formats throughout his career.

The year 1966 marked a turning point in Indiana’s career with the success of his LOVE image, which had been featured in a solo exhibition at the Stable Gallery. The word love, a theme central to Indiana’s work, first appeared in his painting 4-Star Love (1961). Love was a subject of great spiritual significance for the artist, illustrated by the painting Love Is God (1964), which was inspired by an inscription in the Christian Science churches he attended in his youth. Initially experimenting with a composition of stacked letters in a series of 1964 rubbings, Indiana subsequently turned this inventive design, a formal departure from his previous works, into different hard-edged color variations on canvas. Indiana’s LOVE, selected by the Museum of Modern Art in 1965 for its holiday card, quickly permeated wider popular culture, and has become an icon of modern art. The universality of the subject, to which Indiana continued to return, is further evidenced by his translation of his LOVE into AHAVA (Hebrew) and AMOR (Spanish).

In 1978, Indiana chose to remove himself from the New York art world. He settled on the remote island of Vinalhaven in Maine, moving into the Star of Hope, a Victorian building that had previously served as an Odd Fellows Lodge. After a period spent setting up his home and new studio, Indiana turned to themes that related to his local experience, working on a series of 18 large-scale paintings known as The Hartley Elegies (1989–94), inspired by the German Officer paintings of Marsden Hartley, who lived on Vinalhaven in the summer of 1938. Indiana also used found objects to create sculptures such as Ash (1985) and Mars (1990), works that reflected his new surroundings while also making reference to his past, and he returned to and expanded upon his seminal American Dream series, completing The Ninth American Dream in 2001.

In addition to being a painter and sculptor, Indiana created a significant number of prints, among them the Numbers Portfolio (1968), a collaboration with the poet Robert Creeley, as well as many other works of graphic art, including the poster for the opening of the New York State Theater, Lincoln Center (1964), and the poster for the opening exhibition of the Hirshhorn Museum of Art (1974). He designed the stage sets and costumes for the Virgil Thomson and Gertrude Stein opera The Mother of Us All, which was presented in 1967 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and expanded in 1976 for the Santa Fe Opera in honor of the Bicentennial. Indiana also created other unique projects, such as the design for a basketball court at the Milwaukee Exposition Convention Center Arena in 1977.

Indiana’s art has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, and his works are in the permanent collections of important museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo, New York; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the McNay Art Museum, San Antonio; the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin; the Menil Collection, Houston; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Tate Modern, London; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; the Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, the Netherlands; MUMOK (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien), Vienna; the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. He has also been included in numerous international publications, and he has been the subject of a number of monographs.

In 2013, the Whitney Museum of American Art hosted the artist's first New York retrospective, Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE, curated by Barbara Haskell. Indiana passed away in his home on May 19, 2018, just a few weeks before the opening of his sculpture retrospective at the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Robert Indiana: Sculpture, curated by Joe Lin- Hill. Since his passing, exhibitions of his work have been mounted at the Contemporary Art Foundation in Tokyo; Yorkshire Sculpture Park in the United Kingdom; and other international art spaces.

The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative

Established in 2022, The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative, LLC aims to increase awareness of and appreciation for the depth and breadth of the work of Robert Indiana.

Addressing curators and scholars, collectors, art-market professionals, and the public at large, The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative maintains a collection and archive of Robert Indiana’s art; encourages and supports exhibitions and public installations of Indiana’s work; assists with and promotes scholarly research on Indiana and his artistic career; and manages the website robertindiana.com and distributes a newsletter.

The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative was founded by Simon Salama-Caro, who began working as a gallerist with Indiana in 1988, devoting the next few decades to safeguarding and advancing his artistic achievement. From 1995 onward, Salama-Caro worked with Indiana as his exclusive worldwide representative for the authorized production, sale, and promotion of such Indiana sculpture series as LOVE (1966), ART (1972), AHAVA (1977), ONE Through ZERO (The Ten Numbers) (1978), and AMOR (1998).

Simon Salama-Caro and his family work closely and collaboratively with the Star of Hope Foundation, a not-for-profit organization created in Vinalhaven, Maine by Indiana. Royalties from the sale of works in sculpture series offered through Salama-Caro and from a licensing agreement managed by the family help fund the Star of Hope Foundation’s arts-related programs.