Art Basel, June 2020

"I have always been impressed how with a little concentration and a little mental exercise, if one concentrates long enough on a word or figure, it’s very easy to lose the conscious grasp of what that is, and one can look at a word, after concentrating on it for a while, one has almost forgotten what that word is. And I should like in a way this to be a part of my work too."
—Robert Indiana

Robert Indiana’s “LOVE” (1966/99) is a large-scale outdoor sculpture, measuring 8 x 8 x 4 feet and painted in an eye-catching, brightly saturated red and blue. Its monumental proportions and extraordinary visual impact take the work into the public realm, placing it in context with the scale of billboards and corporate signs—though instead of advertising a company or product, it promotes an emotion and an ideal. Considered to be Indiana’s most iconic artwork, “LOVE” became synonymous with his art, and a motif that once developed, he never abandoned. Immediately recognizable, “LOVE” exists as a sign of the Pop artist’s astute understanding of the power of design and contemporary visual culture.
Indiana developed the first incarnation of “LOVE” in 1964 as a design for a personal holiday greeting that he sent to his friends, and then refined as a printed Christmas card for the Museum of Modern Art the following year. In 1966, the artist debuted major paintings of the motif in what he called his “LOVE show” at the Stable Gallery, New York. Popular since its introduction, “LOVE” emerged during the social revolutions of the 1960s and became an emblem of the decade’s utopian ideals. The appeal of Indiana’s design was further enhanced by its adoption into a stamp released by the US Postal Service in 1973.
This three-dimensional construction preserves the graphic power of Indiana’s original painted composition, extending the forms of the letters into depth and establishing a presence in real space. This format of “LOVE” dates to 1967, when Indiana was commissioned by Multiples, Inc. to make his first sculptural version of “LOVE” as a 12-inch high work in aluminum. In 1970, the artist created his first large-scale “LOVE,” which is now housed in the Indianapolis Museum of Art.
Large-scale “LOVE” sculptures can be found in public collections around the world, including at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC; Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas; Indianapolis Museum of Art, Indiana; New Orleans Museum of Art; Hamburger Bahnhof Museum für Gegenwart, Berlin; and The Israel Museum, Jerusalem.

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