ROBERT INDIANA

LOVE - Robert Indiana lives alone in the Star of Hope, a building that towers over the lobstering boats in the harbor of his island in Penobscot Bay. He is solitary and independent, and his number is one, the constant figure at the center of his symbolic self-portraits, called Autoportraits. LOVE, which reaches back to his childhood, is his most reductive word-image. In the sixties it became the collective sign of an era. But LOVE remains self-referential, a fragment of dream-work, and a nexus in Indiana’s oeuvre.
		Highball on the Redball Mannifest From "The American Dream" Book 16" x 14" © 1997 Robert Indiana
		The American Dream From "The American Dream" Book 16" x 14" © 1997 Robert Indiana
		Picasso From "The American Dream" Book 17" x 14" © 1997 Robert Indiana
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THE ARTIST

ROBERT INDIANA

Sigmund Freud use the term dream-work to denote the various activities of the unconscious mind, which sorts through the tumult of experience and gives it symbolic form. The process is an apt metaphor of the creative practice of Robert Indiana, who, during the sixties, was part of the movement known as Pop Art - art that uses the imagery of popular and commercial culture. But Indiana’s references to pinball machines, roadside diners, and highway signs, and the short words and numbers that fill his compositions, are much more than Pop. They are codes of autobiographical meaning. His works are ciphers of his Depression-era childhood and his long climb from anonymity to renown. Dream-work also described Indiana’s critique of the myth of the American Dream.