Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is proud to present
Robert Indiana: A Painter of Signs
From September 22nd to the 29th, 2023.
“LOVE’ bit me. It was a marvelous idea, but it was also a terrible mistake. It became too popular; it became too popular” Robert Indiana.
Glenda Cinquegrana Art Consulting is pleased to launch “Robert Indiana: A Painter of Signs”, an OVR on Artsy dedicated to one of the most influential figures in American art, who played a central role in the development of assemblage art, hard-edge painting, and Pop art within a highly original body of artworks exploring American identity through the power of language.
In this OVR we are happy to display three different works with the aim of depicting the use of signs in Indiana’s inquiry, seen by the artist as a means of disseminating direct messages that the viewer must interpret.
In “Classic Love” for designing the simple word “LOVE” Indiana declared he was inspired by the signs that were on churches boring the phrase “God is Love“. Pulling out only the word “LOVE”, and graphically tilting the vowel O, he represents the instability of human love. Originating from a Christmas card commissioned by MoMA New York in 1964, these pieces from the LOVE series were the most successful of his career. In “Octagon“, which is part of a series of silkscreens dating back to 1975, he chose to set up a dialogue between primary elements of the visual language, such as numbers and the geometrical forms put in a logical association. Thanks to the colors in the background, these primary figures are turned into highly recognizable pop figures.
The work under the title “Four Winds” was a centerfold part of a book by artist and poet Walasse Ting entitled “1Cent Life” published in 1964, bringing together a community of artists traversing the moments of Abstract Expressionism and Pop: Jim Dine, Robert Indiana, Allan Kaprow, Roy Lichtenstein, Joan Mitchell, Claes Oldenburg, Mel Ramos, Robert Rauschenberg, James Rosenquist, Andy Warhol, Tom Wesselmann, and Ting himself.
A multitude of coloured arrows distributed in four directions and numbers, intended as fully recognizable American signs, are an allusion to the four winds of life cited in the poetical text by Walasse.
