Robert Indiana’s gem-like LOVE canvas from 1969 is an outstanding example of the artists most famous and iconic series. Both visually refined and conceptually enthralling LOVE typifies the most exemplary components of the artists oeuvre on an intimate and delightful scale. The strict and engrossing geometry of this work is interrupted by the O, which cants outward in a note of jaunty discordance. Upon deeper visual engagement, the audience can relinquish its grasp on the legibility of the word, instead turning to the purity of the blue and green ‘negative spaces’ that resolve into elegant shapes in and of themselves.

The scale of this work is tremendously rare in Indiana’s series of LOVE paintings with only six examples in the palette of Red, Blue and Green painted by Indiana as a single panel- the largest of which is held in the collects ion of the Indianapolis Museum of Art. Indiana’s LOVE remains a t.mes less symbol of a universal concept, one to which the entire condition of humanity continues to aspire. Indeed, testifying to their power and importance Indiana’s sculptural iterations reside are in public and private collects ions, worldwide including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the San Francisco Museum of Art, the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York and the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in Washington, D.C.

The present works comes from the remarkable collects ion of Bill Katz who has charted his legacy as a designer, taste-making architect and an aesthetic adviser to many of the world’s most creative luminaries including artists Anselm Kiefer, Agnes Martin, Cy Twombly and Jasper Johns. After graduating from Johns Hopkins, Katz moved to New York City, where he met Robert Indiana, Agnes Martin, Marisol and Andy Warhol. He became lifelong friends with Agnes Martin and Robert Indiana both of whom gifted him the works on offer the year they were created. Indiana gifted Katz two paintings in 1969—both gems and icons of the artist’s practice.

Indiana, like some of his fellow artists, scavenged the area’s abandoned warehouses for materials, creating sculptural assemblages from old wooden beams, rusted metal wheels, and other remnants of the shipping trade that had thrived in Coenties Slip. The discovery of 19th century brass stencils led to the incorporation of brightly colored numbers and short emotionally charged words into these sculptures as well as canvases, and became the basis of his new painterly vocabulary.

Divorced from their everyday meaning by prolonged study and removed from their original context, numbers and letters acquired a form of artistic beauty as shapes and silhouettes in their own right. Viewed in this light, LOVE becomes almost abstract in nature, a bold stamp of sinuous curves deployed in conjunction with sharp straight lines to create an object of lyrical beauty and harmonious balance. Ed Ruscha forms a worthy artistic comparison, an artist who similarly allows text to drift apart from its symbolic meaning and to carry weight as much as an aesthetic motif of formalist beauty as a linguistic symbol of emotive import. In LOVE, the viewer is encouraged to contemplate the inherent beauty of the curves and lines that compose each letter, lending the word ‘love’ a higher order meaning divorced from its everyday connotations. Indiana further elaborates on the idea behind this work as he states “It’s always been a matter of impact, the relationship of color to color and word to shape and word to complete the piece – both the literal and visual aspects. I’m most concerned with the force of its impact” (Robert Indiana quoted in Susan Elizabeth Ryan, Love and the America Dream: The Art of Robert Indiana, Portland 1999, p. 39).

Of the incredible fame of this icon that has transcended cultures and languages, Indiana has said, “I had no idea LOVE would catch on the way it did. Oddly enough, I wasn’t thinking at all about anticipating the Love generation and hippies. It was a spiritual concept...It’s become the very theme of love itself.” (The artist quoted in Exh. Cat., Rockland, Maine, The William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum (and travelling), Indiana’s Indianas, 1982, p. 8). In 1966 Indiana embarked on translating the image into three dimensional format in creating what has become undoubtedly his most iconic work, LOVE (1966), an aluminum sculpture of the word with a tilted “O.” Examples of these works have been installed worldwide. With a career spanning six decades, this painting is a prime example of Indiana’s mastery of color and form.