Robert Indiana: The American Dream
Robert Indiana, The American Dream, 1992, cast 2015 SCULPTURE painted bronze 83-7/8" ×35 1/2" ×11-13/16" (213 cm ×90.2 cm ×30 cm)© The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative, courtesy Pace Gallery
Pace is pleased to announce that it will present Robert Indiana: The American Dream, a major exhibition including seminal examples of paintings and sculpture created by the artist beginning in the early 1960s and developed throughout subsequent decades of his artistic career, to be shown at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York from May 9 to August 15. Examining Indiana’s critique of the duality of the American Dream—both its promise and its privations—this exhibition will highlight the connections between the artist’s personal history and the social, political, and cultural realities of postwar America. Reflecting on the critical and political underpinnings of Indiana’s work, as well as his enduring impact as an artist, Pace’s presentation will include loans from several prominent institutions.
One of the preeminent figures in American art since the 1960s, Robert Indiana–born Robert Clark in the state of Indiana in 1928–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. His legacy resonates in the work of many contemporary artists who make the written word a central element of their oeuvre, making him one of the most important figures in the recent history of art.
Robert Indiana,Apogee ,1970 PAINTING oil on canvas 60" ×50" (152.4 cm ×127 cm) © The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative, courtesy Pace Gallery
Pace’s exhibition in New York will be accompanied by a new catalogue from Pace Publishing, which will shed light on Indiana’s lifelong artistic engagement with both the aspirations of the American dream and its dark underbelly–the repressed dimensions of American history and society, from colonialism to materialism and commodification. Among the works on view will be the 1961 painting The Calumet, which features the names of Native American tribes, acknowledging the presence of Indigenous life and culture within the subconscious of America; The Black Marilyn (1967/1998), a painting that speaks to the commodification of celebrity and desire in American mass media in the 1960s; and the painted bronze sculpture The American Dream (1992/2015), bearing fundamental words of the human condition: “HUG,” “ERR,” “EAT,” and “DIE.”
Robert Indiana, Flagellant,1963/1969 SCULPTURE oil on wood, with rope and cast iron 63" (160 cm), variable width © The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative, courtesy Pace Gallery
“In many ways, Indiana is an artist whose work has been eclipsed by its own fame. This exhibition is about rediscovering the real Indiana, the radical and probing artist he really was. Both a pioneer and an outlier in the 1960s, the impact of his efforts to imbue formalist abstraction with content is difficult to overstate. Indiana’s work of the sixties reveals the true nature of the American dream as a dialectic: even as it uplifts, it also oppresses. Even as it offers the grandest of aspirations, it remains founded in a history of violence that lies embedded in language itself.”
Robert Indiana, LOVE (The American LOVE),1966–2000, Conceived: 1966; Executed: 2000 SCULPTURE polychrome aluminum36" ×36" ×18" (91.4 cm ×91.4 cm ×45.7 cm)© The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative, courtesy Pace Gallery
Pace’s presentation will also include works from Indiana’s iconic LOVE series, recontextualizing this important and well-known image within his broader practice and tying this motif to other words and ideas—including “EAT” and “DIE”—that recur across his paintings and sculptures, symbols of both personal and universal significance in Indiana’s work.
Robert Indiana, The Demuth Five, 1963, PAINTING, oil on canvas 64" ×64" (162.6 cm ×162.6 cm), diamond, © The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative, courtesy Pace Gallery
Today, Indiana’s work can be found in the permanent collections of museums including 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 San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Menil Collection, Houston; Tate Modern, London; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; MUMOK (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien), Vienna; Museum Ludwig, Cologne; the Van Abbe museum, Eindhoven; and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, among many other institutions around the world.
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 in Vinalhaven, Maine, on May 19, 2018, just a few weeks before the opening of his sculpture retrospective at the Buffalo AKG Art Museum, New York (then Albright-Knox Art Gallery). Important posthumous one-artist exhibitions include, Love & Peace: A Robert Indiana Memorial Exhibition, Contemporary Art Foundation, Tokyo (2018); Robert Indiana: A Legacy of Love, McNay Art Museum, San Antonio, Texas (2020); Robert Indiana: Sculpture 1958-2018, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, West Bretton, United Kingdom (2022); Robert Indiana at Rockefeller Center, Rockefeller Center, New York (2023); and Robert Indiana: The Sweet Mystery, Procuratie Vecchie, Venice (2024), among others.
Established in 2022, The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative aims to increase awareness of and appreciation for the depth and breadth of the work of Robert Indiana and is the leading entity dedicated to the advancement of the artist’s work. Represented worldwide by Pace Gallery, The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative also manages the website www.robertindiana.com and is responsible for The Robert Indiana Catalogue Raisonné, which is now available online www.ricatalogueraisonne.org.
For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Pace Gallery’s website here. Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram and Artsy, too
