Exclusive Offers & Updates!
Prints.Com Logo
About Us      Contact Us      View Cart
For Help Ordering    
1-800-728-0527
Search our Art Prints and Posters search left
Powered by Netrics
Fiona  Armer

Robert Indiana

Artist Biography

Back to Art, Prints & Posters Collection
Robert Indiana

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; art, prints and posters that 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 art, prints and posters; 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 art, prints and posters 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.

Robert Indiana Art, Prints and Posters Collection