According to the Artist

Although Robert Indiana came to prominence during the 1960s as a Pop artist, his concerns have always differed greatly from those of his contemporaries. National and cultural identity and the rhetoric of the American dream have shaped Indiana’s imagery and its deceptively simple visual language. After receiving a degree from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1953, he moved to New York City.

He became part of the artist community that included Ellsworth Kelly and Jack Youngerman, and began to work with geometric styles, incorporating aspects of advertising and road signs, and the visual techniques of commercial advertising, such as flat, unmodulated color and oversized scale. His iconic, hard-edge style of simplified compositions using letters, words and numbers was arrived at early. Always fascinated by the highway signs he observed from his childhood, Indiana’s “American Dream” series of paintings—with stylized letters spelling TILT and JILT, JUKE and JACK, EAT and DIE—comment on aspects of American life and American values, with imagery that has symbolic significance on more than one level.

In 1973, the US Postal Service used Indiana’s “LOVE” painting for the first of their annual “LOVE” stamps. With a printing of 300 million, it became the most reproduced image in Pop Art. His internationally recognized LOVE sculptures, first created in 1970 and even translated into other languages, are in collections throughout the world.