Robert Indiana American, 1928-2018

Robert Indiana was born in New Castle, Indiana, in 1928 and spent the final decades of his life on the island of Vinalhaven, Maine, where he died in 2018. He made language, colour and form the foundations of his practice, constructing a body of work that became both instantly recognisable and deeply emblematic of post-war America. Best known for his bold use of type, numbers and flat planes of colour, Indiana approached words not just as carriers of meaning, but as physical objects – sculptural, weighty, and charged. His work interrogated national identity, the idealism of the American dream, and the emotional complexity beneath its surfaces. The LOVE motif, with its stacked letters and off-kilter “O”, originated as a commission for a Museum of Modern Art Christmas card in 1965. It quickly detached from its origins, becoming a symbol of the 1960s counterculture and, later, a global shorthand for intimacy and desire.

Indiana understood the slippage between image and text and exploited it deliberately. His practice often circled back to the same handful of words – EAT, DIE, HOPE – as if to test their durability, their capacity to carry personal memory and collective experience alike. Though frequently associated with Pop Art, Indiana occupied a more ambiguous space, drawing from hard-edge painting, assemblage, and the sign-making traditions of American vernacular culture. His work remains a study in paradox: formal yet emotional, universal yet rooted in autobiography.

After serving for three years in the United States Air Force, Indiana enrolled in the Art Institute of Chicago in 1949. He went on to study at both the Skowhegan School of Painting and Sculpture in Maine in 1953, Edinburgh University, and the Edinburgh College of Art between 1953 and 1954. Indiana’s artwork features in the collections of prestigious museums globally, including Museum of Modern Art, (MoMA), 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, San Francisco; Menil Collection, Houston; Tate Modern, London; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Netherlands; Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Museum Ludwig, Vienna; Art Museum of Ontario, Toronto; and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem.