Robert Indiana Joins Pace Gallery

Pace is pleased to announce its global representation of The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative, the primary organization advocating for the achievement of the artist and maintaining a collection and archive of his work. At the vanguard of Pop art and assemblage, Robert Indiana made use of letters and numerals in his bold sculptures, paintings, and prints to explore American identity and iconography as well as the universal power of abstraction. Employing language and color as key materials for his works across media, Indiana called himself an “American painter of signs,” developing a uniquely graphic visual vocabulary that—imbued with literary, political, and spiritual import—made him one of the most inventive and enduring figures in the history of American art.

Pace’s representation of works from The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative begins a new chapter in a long relationship between the gallery and the artist. In 1962, two years after Arne Glimcher founded Pace in Boston, he included Indiana’s paintings in Stock Up for the Holidays, a group exhibition he organized at the gallery’s original location on Newbury Street. As the first major presentation of Pop art in the United States outside New York, Stock Up for the Holidays introduced Boston to the burgeoning movement. Thirty years later, Indiana was featured in Pace’s 1993 group exhibition Coenties Slip in New York. Curated by Milly Glimcher, this show was named for the former port in New York City where a community of artists—including Indiana, Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, and Jack Youngerman—lived and worked in the 1950s.

As with other important postwar estates and foundations in Pace’s program, including those of Martin, Robert Whitman, Claes Oldenburg, Jean Dubuffet, Robert Irwin, Sam Gilliam, Kenneth Noland, and Mark Rothko, the gallery will present exhibitions that delve into the periods and processes that made Indiana one of the most influential and important artists of his time.

Marc Glimcher, CEO of Pace Gallery, says:

“Robert Indiana used language and color to convey universal messages of feeling and truth in his art. One of the central figures in the vibrant Coenties Slip scene, a hotbed of creativity and experimentation in New York during the postwar years, he proposed radical new modes of art making. Like Martin and the other artists in that community—which so many years later has taken on an almost mythic dimension—Indiana pursued a different kind of expression through his work, reshaping the history of art in that process. We’re thrilled to welcome the works held by The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative to our program, where they fit so seamlessly.”

Simon Salama-Caro, Founder of the Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative, says:

“The return of Robert Indiana’s work to Pace Gallery is a wonderful new moment in the art world’s evolving recognition of the achievement of this great artist, in all its depth and breadth. Beginning with the reappraisals of scholars such as Thomas Crow, Barbara Haskell, Joe Lin-Hill, and Robert Storr and the retrospective exhibitions Robert Indiana: Beyond LOVE at the Whitney Museum of American Art and Robert Indiana: Sculpture at the Albright-Knox, a new understanding has been building of both the formal brilliance of Indiana’s work and the complexity of its subject matter and emotions.”

To learn more about Robert Indiana, click here.