Robert Indiana. To Russia with Love

Opening: April 7, 2016, 4pm at The Marble Palace

Robert Indiana rose to prominence in the early 1960s as a key protagonist of the emerging Pop Art movement. Renowned for his use of audacious colors in his own striking interpretation of hard

edge painting, Indiana’s work draws on a multitude of visual vernaculars encompassing the h igh and the low. Merging literary sources with the signage system unique to the American commercial landscape, Indiana ’s work re presents a simultaneously broad yet also autobiographically c oded pictorial language derived from these signifiers. Indiana’s doubtlessly most widely known work is his word

image LOVE, first conceiv ed for The Museum of Modern Art’s (New York) Christmas card in 1965. A stamp released that same year bearing the motif became a nation

wide bestseller, while LOVE would soon adorn myriad objects and media of various scale s and shape s across the globe, spreading Indiana’s universal message in the most democratic and powerful way s modern art is capable of. This universal status of LOVE is further emphasized not only by way of the motif’s varying manifestation as a metal sc ulpture, a painting or a screen print but furthermore through its translation into the respective language of the locale LOVE inhabits. In doing so the c oncept of LOVE as a unifying force regardless of nationality and ethnicity is given timeless formal shape.

Evgenia Petrova
Deputy Director for Academic Research
The State Russian Museum