Robert Indiana, born Clark, was born in New Castle (USA) in 1928.
He took his name form his American state of origin. He settled in New York City in 1954 and started working with Pop Art artists, employing typical images to create commercial art mixed with existentialism, gradually evolving towards what Indiana called "sculptural poems".
Indiana was also a theatre stage set and costume designer, as in the 1976 Santa Fe Opera production of Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All, based on the life of US suffragette Susan B. Anthony. After the attacks of September 11th, 2001, Indiana produced a series of Peace Paintings, which were exhibited in New York in 2004.
Indiana’s work often consists of bold, simple, iconic images, especially numbers and short words like EAT, HUG, and, his best known example, LOVE. His best known image is the word “love” in upper-case letters, arranged in a square with the letter O tilted. This red/green/blue image was initially created for a Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art in 1965 and later placed on an eight-cent U.S. Postal Service stamp in 1973.
There are several sculptural version of Robert Indiana’s “LOVE” image, placed all over the world: New York, Philadelphia, Las Vegas, Montreal, Madrid, Tokyo and Singapore.
He died in Vinalhaven (USA) in 2018.
