.jpg?w=1)
.jpg?w=1)
拍品專文
Bold and beautiful, Robert Indiana's LOVE is a heroic sculpture from the artist's most iconic and internationally celebrated series. Rendered in industrial aluminium block lettering, the word LOVE stands life-size with its constituent letters assembled over two lines in a clean-edged, brilliantly uniform cube. One of the preeminent figures of American Pop, Indiana first arrived at his high-impact graphic vocabulary during the 1950s. He was then working in the derelict studios of the Coenties Slip situated at the foot of Manhattan, interacting regularly with artists such as Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist and Elsworth Kelly. It was here in the deserted studio loft that Indiana discovered the abandoned commercial stencils that were to establish the geometric matrix for his future body of work. For Indiana, this simple, vibrant aesthetic imported a sense of optimism, celebrating all things American including the urban geometry of New York City. His concept was to dramatically contrast the emotive and existential atmosphere of the painterly Abstract Expressionists that had been so dominant for a generation.
Indiana had been using text for many years, the word love arising first in 1958 with his concrete poem 'Wherefore the Punctuation of the Heart'. Although not the only artist to use text within the context of art, his LOVE series marked the first time a single, effusive word would become the 'proper and viable subject for art' (The artist quoted in C. Weinhardt (ed.), Robert Indiana, New York, 1990, p.154). His original motif was first elaborated in 1965 as a painting to be reproduced on the front of a greetings card for the Museum of Modern Art. It was later exhibited in 1966 as a square painting with its stacked pairs of red letters: 'L' and italicized 'O' situated atop 'VE', realised against a blue and green ground. These bright, monochrome colours recall the staggering mid-Western landscape of the artist's youth: its vivid and expansive blue skies and the emblematic red from the Phillips 66 Gasoline Company sign where his father had worked during the Great Depression. In LOVE, Indiana replaces this red with rich racing green, coupled with blue, an effective and quintessential combination for the artist.
Indiana himself could not have predicted the impact and popular appeal that this simple typographic arrangement would have amongst the public. Widely proliferated through the lack of any copyright control, Indiana's motif became synonymous with the youth driven counter-culture of the 1960s. LOVE captured the contemporary zeitgeist of the Love Generation with its anti-Vietnam protests, civil rights rallies and non-nuclear proliferation lobbies. Indeed the word became perpetuated in flower power slogans such as 'Make Love Not War' and the San Francisco hippie revolution, the Summer of Love. As such, LOVE goes beyond the geometric and abstract quality of its form to the symbolic and allusive connotations of the word. As Indiana explained, 'in a sense, I got down to the subject matter of my work the subject if defined by its expression in the word itself LOVE is purely a skeleton of all that word has meant in all the erotic and religious aspects of the theme, and to bring it down to the actual structure of the calligraphy [is to reduce it] to the bare bones' (The artist quoted in T. Brakeley (ed.), Robert Indiana, New York, 1990, p. 166)
Indiana had been using text for many years, the word love arising first in 1958 with his concrete poem 'Wherefore the Punctuation of the Heart'. Although not the only artist to use text within the context of art, his LOVE series marked the first time a single, effusive word would become the 'proper and viable subject for art' (The artist quoted in C. Weinhardt (ed.), Robert Indiana, New York, 1990, p.154). His original motif was first elaborated in 1965 as a painting to be reproduced on the front of a greetings card for the Museum of Modern Art. It was later exhibited in 1966 as a square painting with its stacked pairs of red letters: 'L' and italicized 'O' situated atop 'VE', realised against a blue and green ground. These bright, monochrome colours recall the staggering mid-Western landscape of the artist's youth: its vivid and expansive blue skies and the emblematic red from the Phillips 66 Gasoline Company sign where his father had worked during the Great Depression. In LOVE, Indiana replaces this red with rich racing green, coupled with blue, an effective and quintessential combination for the artist.
Indiana himself could not have predicted the impact and popular appeal that this simple typographic arrangement would have amongst the public. Widely proliferated through the lack of any copyright control, Indiana's motif became synonymous with the youth driven counter-culture of the 1960s. LOVE captured the contemporary zeitgeist of the Love Generation with its anti-Vietnam protests, civil rights rallies and non-nuclear proliferation lobbies. Indeed the word became perpetuated in flower power slogans such as 'Make Love Not War' and the San Francisco hippie revolution, the Summer of Love. As such, LOVE goes beyond the geometric and abstract quality of its form to the symbolic and allusive connotations of the word. As Indiana explained, 'in a sense, I got down to the subject matter of my work the subject if defined by its expression in the word itself LOVE is purely a skeleton of all that word has meant in all the erotic and religious aspects of the theme, and to bring it down to the actual structure of the calligraphy [is to reduce it] to the bare bones' (The artist quoted in T. Brakeley (ed.), Robert Indiana, New York, 1990, p. 166)