ROBERT INDIANA (1928 -
)
Robert Indiana, an American painter, sculptor
and graphic artist was born in New Castle, Indiana in 1928. He
graduated from Arsenal Technical High School, Indianapolis in
1942 and had his first one-man show of watercolors; works which
bear the influence of Reginald Marsh, Edward Hopper and Charles
Sheeler.
Indiana's work has evolved into hard-edged
graphic images of words, logos and typographic forms, earning
him a reputation as one of the country's leading contemporary
artists.
In 1945 he attended Saturday classes at
the John Herron Art Institute, studying under Edwin Fulwinder.
Though he received a scholarship to this institution in 1946,
he entered the Army Air Corps instead. While serving in the Army
he attended classes at Syracuse University and studied under
Oscar Weissbuch at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Institute.
From 1949 to 1953 he attended the School
of the Art Institute, Chicago.He then completed his BFA requirements
at the university of Edinburgh while on a travel fellowship,
and later moved to New York.
In the mid 1950s he was living near Ellsworth
Kelly, Jack Youngerman, James Rosenquist, Charles Hinnman and
other artists on Coenties Slip in New York. It was at this time
that he began doing hard-edged paintings; the first ones based
on the doubled form of the ginkgo leaf, a motif that continued
for several years.
In the early 1960s he did his first constructions
of junk wood and weathered iron. These works, at first severely
geometric, combine metal and wood with gesso. In the early 1960s
several of his works were purchased by major museums and collectors
and his pieces were included in many exhibitions, including his
first one-man show in 1962 at the Stable Gallery, New York. In
1964 he collaborated with Andy Warhol on the film EAT and in
the same year received his first public commission, a work for
the exterior of the New York State Pavilion at the New York World's
Fair -- a 20-foot EAT Sign.
In 1967 he exhibited one of his few figurative
works, Mother and Father (1963-67, collection of the artist),
at the Ninth Sao Paulo Bienal, Brazil. He was represented at
Documents IV, Kassel, Germany by some fifteen pieces and did
a serigraph, Die Deutsche Vier, for this exhibition.
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