1982 Original Robert Indiana Autoportrait 1969 Museum Gallery Poster Pop Art 24"

Description

Original 1982, yellow and black Robert Indiana art exhibit poster “Indiana’s Indianas” featuring the Farnsworth Museum and the Colby College Museum of Art.

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.

“I don’t think any other decade will mean the same thing to me as the ’60s did,” Robert Indiana once said. During this historic decade, Indiana developed his signature style of painting numbers and letters, started exhibiting in major museums, and befriended some of the most influential artists of the time, including Andy Warhol. Quickly growing nostalgic for this radical period, Indiana began his “Decade: Autoportrait” series in 1971, creating paintings and prints that captured each year of his life from 1960–1969. For example, the first in the series, Decade: Autoportrait 1960, is adorned with words that hint at what was most meaningful to Indiana that year: “ELLS” references his friend Ellsworth Kelly, “THE WATERFRONT” refers to the south tip of Manhattan where Indiana lived, and “PEARL” and “SOUTH ST” were neighboring streets that housed friends and fellow artists like Robert Rauschenberg and Agnes Martin.

When Robert Indiana moved to NYC in 1954, he moved to a space 25-31 Coenties Slip, an area just below the Financial District. Outside his loft Indiana saw signs more plentiful than trees, and wrote of that time that "the front of [Coenties] 25 was covered with words that influenced me in my work every day....the brass stencils I found in the loft - numbers, names of boats, and companies from the nineteenth century - became the matrices and materials for my work, and especially for my painting.

Condition

Very Good – See pictures

Dimensions

18.25 x 24" x 1” (Width x Height x Depth)