Municipal Picture Gallery Casa Rusca
Internationally recognized for his works, the famous American artist Robert Indiana will be the protagonist from 9 April to 13 August 2017 in a major exhibition at the Casa Rusca Municipal Art Gallery in Locarno.
The exhibition follows the extensive retrospectives promoted at MoMA, the Whitney Museum in New York and in other major American and European museums, the latest of which in chronological order, the Russian State Museum in St. Petersburg where an exhibition of his was organized. last summer. Numerous of Indiana's most significant works from the latter exhibition will be presented, together with other rarely exhibited paintings and sculptures, in Locarno.
Indiana's extraordinary fame is also undoubtedly linked to her sculpture "LOVE", an unmistakable icon of Pop Art, which can be admired in important public places around the world, from Seventh Avenue in New York to the gardens of the Museum of Art in New Orleans. , up to the main square of Taipei.
The Locarno exhibition, in which the public will be able to admire the main pictorial and sculptural works of Indiana, created since the end of the XNUMXs is the result of a fruitful collaboration with the Galerie Gmurzynska in Zurich and is set up as the first solo show of Indiana in a Swiss museum.
The artist, born in New Castle in 1928 as Robert Clark (the stage name derives from his state of origin), is recognized as one of the leading voices of Pop Art, along with Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Claes Oldenburg, Tom Wesselmann and James Rosenquist.
Indiana, however, stands out from her colleagues for the peculiarity of her art, with references to her own cultural and pictorial roots and in which she blends idea, word and image in forms that he himself defines as "verbal-visual". His artistic thinking is both visual and verbal: aware of the fact that language plays a role in the thought process and this includes his identification with something visual, in his works the artist brings out images from words and, vice versa, words from images.
Indiana is a writer who paints and that makes him unique. His main interest is the communication of ideas through a language in which the use of text, signs and numbers pushes the observer to a dialogue. The artist uses his images-text as stimuli for the imagination: the viewer is therefore invited to create a connection between the meaning of a word and his own personal association.
Robert Indiana uses signs that are widespread and universally known, with the intention of proposing an immediate and impactful art, which can be within everyone's reach, but mixed with a profound existential meaning. Each work is in fact pervaded by a vast range of autobiographical, cultural and historical references. It can therefore be said that in his art a great formal simplification and a high intellectual complexity meet.
The artist proposes a graphic style where color dominates and where the signs of advertising are widely found, immediately winning the observer's attention. A relevant element of Robert Indiana's work is also typography. In fact, works such as Decade Autoportrait 1968 present overlapping of different signs, which accentuate the expression of his visual ideas, also nourished by the direct confrontation with exponents of the minimalist movement such as Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin and Jack Youngerman, who contributed to the geometric style of his works.
The exhibition at Casa Rusca investigates, through about sixty works, the artist's production starting from the end of the XNUMXs, when he moved to the Big Apple in a loft in the port area of Coenties Slip, where the meeting with the aforementioned representatives of the minimalist movement brings him to a stylistic turn, gathering all the charm of a painting with a geometric, clean, "hard-edge" vein.
Alongside the first paintings of an abstract nature, the exhibition itinerary presents the assemblages called "Herms" made with worn material (ship masts, wooden planks, metal and rusty wheels), the columns crossed by short inscriptions, the sculptures (the very famous “LOVE”), up to the recent creations in which the themes of his research are translated into ideograms.
Indiana is in fact known above all as "the man who invented LOVE", a word that has followed him since 1966, when the first "LOVE" catapulted him to honors and fame.
An icon of the 1964st century, the famous work “LOVE” was created for the first time in 1998 - commissioned by MoMA - as a Christmas greeting card, before becoming a polychrome aluminum sculpture. This work, an unmistakable universally recognized icon of Pop Art, was also a symbol of the pacifist movement of the 1966s and subsequent generations. His most recognizable work is counterbalanced by the sculpture “AMOR” (XNUMX) which with the same structure in pairs of superimposed letters. The transition of LOVE from painting to print to sculpture culminates in the monumental “LOVE WALL” (XNUMX), present in the exhibition. In it we observe the use of the mirror repetition of images often used by the artist as an expedient to recall his "binocular vision": doubling the image suggests two opposite points of view and / or an internal and an external vision. Absolutely among the most exploited and replicated images in the world, "LOVE" has entered mass culture, has been and still is reproduced in advertisements, on book and record covers, in magazines, posters, on clothing and furniture, and so on. Its explosive popularity, at the time it was created, changed everyone's perception of Indiana and his work.
Municipal Picture Gallery Casa Rusca
Piazza Sant'Antonio, 6600 Locarno
Tuesday - Sunday 10.00-12.00 / 14.00-17.00. Monday closed
Reservations: +41 (0) 91 756 31 85
www.museocasarusca.ch
