Robert Indiana | Decade No. 6 (1980)

Robert Indiana is a keystone of the 1960s artistic canon. Creating “sculptural poems,” Indiana fuses commercial art with Existentialism, and first came to prominence with his iconic sculpture LOVE. His screenprint Decade No. 6 (1980) is one from a series of “decade autoportraits,” bright primary colors celebrating deeply resonant events in a tight Pop art composition. Robert Indiana has been the focus of over 30 solo exhibitions throughout his career, and is represented in the collection of the Tate Britain, the Museum Kursthaus Kleve, Germany, and the Hara Museum of Contemporary Art, Japan.

Signed lower right, "Robert Indiana".

General Electric Corporate Art Collection
Heather James Fine Art

About Robert Indiana

One of the central figures of the Pop Art movement, Robert Indiana takes his inspiration from commercial signs, claiming: “There are more signs than trees in America. There are more signs than leaves. So I think of myself as a painter of American landscape.” In his paintings, sculptures, and prints, he mimics and re-arranges the words and numbers of a myriad of signs, including the Phillips 66 gas station logo and the “Yield” traffic sign. He is most famous for his “Love” paintings and sculptures, first produced in the 1960s. Creating a block out of the word—with the “L” and the “O” set atop the “V” and the “E”—Indiana has effectively inserted his own sign into the mix. His “LOVE” painting was reproduced on a postage stamp in 1973; his “LOVE” sculptures are installed in public spaces worldwide.

American, b. 1928, New Castle, Indiana, based in New York, New York