Robert Indiana

HOPE IV Autumn, 2010

One of the pre-eminent figures of American art since the 1960s, Robert Indiana has been a pioneer of assemblage art, hard-edge abstraction and pop art. Over the past five decades, Indiana’s work has explored the power of abstraction and language, American identity and personal history. As a self-proclaimed “American painter of signs,” Indiana gained international renown in the early 1960s for employing the vernacular form of American road and shop signs, combining it with a sophisticated formal and conceptual approach that turned this familiar vocabulary into something entirely new.

Indiana’s artwork has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, and his work is included in the permanent collection of many important museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, 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 in Houston, Texas, the Museum Ludwig in Cologne, Germany, Stedelijk van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, Netherlands, the Museum Ludwig in Vienna, Austria, the Shanghai Art Museum in China, and the Israel Museum, Jerusalem. He has also been included in numerous international publications, including a number of monographs dedicated to his work.