Robert Indiana: Hard Edge

Robert Indiana, a major figure of post-war American art, draws his subject matter from the visual vernacular of highway road signs, factory die-cut stencils, and commercial logos both remembered from childhood and encountered after he left home for Chicago and New York City. A pioneer of the verbal-visual motif, a rigorous formalist, and a master colorist, Indiana’s carefully-conceived permutations of his iconic imagery in painting, print-making, and sculpture are both instantly recognizable and culturally resonant. Distilling several stylistic trajectories into a single concentrated image, Indiana deploys recognizable words, symbols, and emblems in ways that reveal their structural power and also express the artist’s social and spiritual concerns.  For each composition, Indiana works through successive stages of image-making, beginning in drawing and painting and culminating in the translation of his flat, hard-edged compositions into vibrantly-colored, voluptuous sculpture. The smooth lines, calligraphic curves, and geometric rigor retains the work’s connection to Indiana’s artistic and cultural heritage of early American modernism, especially Charles Demuth and Marsden Hartley, while the dramatic scale and three-dimensional solidity transform Indiana’s pictorial candor into independent forms with architectural aspirations.