Sunday 14 December 2008

Robert Indiana

Robert Indiana
American artist associated with the Pop Art Movement.
Robert Indiana was born in New Castle, Indiana. He moved to New York City in 1954 and joined the pop art movement, using distinctive imagery drawing on commercial art approaches blended with existentialism, that gradually moved toward what Indiana calls "sculptural poems".
Indiana's work often consists of bold, simple, iconic images, especially numbers and short words like EAT, HUG, and, his best known example, LOVE.

Ahava ('love' in Hebrew), Cor-ten steel sculpture by Robert Indiana (American), 1977, Israel Museum, Jerusalem, Israel
Indiana's iconic work LOVE was first created for a Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art in 1964 and later was included on an eight-cent United States Postal Service postage stamp in 1973, the first of their regular series of "love stamps." Sculptural versions of the image have been installed at numerous American and international locations.
LOVE is a pop art sculpture by Robert Indiana. Physically the sculpture consists of the large letter LO, with the O canted sideways, over the letters VE. The letters are red on their faces and blue on their sides. Robert Indiana’s Love image takes sculptural form in numerous locations around the world, from New York's Sixth Avenue to Taipei 101; the icon represents the centerpiece of LOVE Park in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Originally a design for a stamp, the image has been reproduced and parodied in posters, pictures, jewelry, greeting cards.
One of the first Love sculptures, created in 1970 of cor-ten steel, stands in the sculpture garden at the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
[1]

Sculpture at Taipei 101, Taiwan

Sculpture in Shinjuku, Tokyo, Japan
Sculpture versions of the image have been installed at these American locations:
Sixth Avenue in
New York City
E W
Fairchild-Martindale Library, Lehigh University Asa Packer Campus
Pratt Institute campus in Brooklyn, New York
Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indianapolis, Indiana
Scottsdale's Civic Center
"
LOVE Park" in Philadelphia
New Orleans Museum of Art's sculpture garden
Middlebury College campus, Vermont [2],[3]
University of Pennsylvania campus, Philadelphia
Museum of Art at
Brigham Young University, Utah
Ursinus College campus in Collegeville, Pennsylvania
Pool area of the
Red Rock Resort Spa and Casino in Las Vegas
Wichita State University campus in Wichita, Kansas
City Park in
New Orleans, Louisiana
Outside the United States sculptural versions of Indiana's image have been installed at these locations:
Taipei 101 in Taipei, Taiwan (also displays Indiana's 1-0)[4]
Shinjuku I-LAND Tower in
Nishi-Shinjuku office district in Tokyo, Japan
Orchard Road in Singapore
Plaza del Sagrado Corazón in
Bilbao, Basque Country Spain
Outside 1445 West Georgia Street in
Vancouver, Canada
Praca do Rossio in
Lisbon, Portugal
CentralWorld in Bangkok, Thailand
Zendai Museum of Modern Art in
Shanghai,China
Chatsworth in Derbyshire, UK, as part of the Sotheby's Beyond Limits exhibition, 2008.
Other languages:
An Indiana sculpture showing the Hebrew word for love (ahava) is displayed at The
Israel Museum in Jerusalem, Israel.
An Indiana sculpture showing the Italian word for love (amor) is displayed outside the
Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II on Piazza della Scala in Milan, Italy.
The image has been reproduced and parodied countless times in sculptures, posters, and 3-D desk ornaments. It has been rendered in
Hebrew, Chinese, and Spanish. It strongly influenced the original book cover for Erich Segal's novel Love Story. A parody appeared on a Rage Against the Machine album cover, Renegades, as well as the cover for Oasis' single 'Little by Little' from the 2002 album Heathen Chemistry. London artist D*Face recently parodied the image by rendering the word hate with the A tilted. Belgian artist Eddy Gabriel made a version using the word lost.[5] Evan Greenfield updated the sculpture with his sculpture "I'm Lovin' It". The sculpture appears in the Xbox expansion of Tony Hawk's Pro Skater 2, which has a stage set in Philadelphia (mainly the LOVE Park), and it is remade as to read "THPS". The level, complete with the sculpture, is seen again in Tony Hawk's Underground 2.
The LOVE emblem has been adopted by
skateboarders and frequently appears in skateboard magazines and videos. After skateboarding was banned in Philadelphia's LOVE Park, the emblem was used by organizations opposing the ban.[6]

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