The works span Indiana’s
beginnings in the mid-century New York artist community of Coenties Slip,
which
included Indiana’s close friends Ellsworth Kelly and Agnes Martin, to
his
chosen remote island home off the coast of Maine, where he has spent the
past four
decades in mythic isolation. These pieces, many exhibited publicly for the
first time, represent the largest and most decided works in Indiana’s
sculptural oeuvre.
The five decades of work that
will be displayed represents the first
time that an exhibition will focus on exploring the full extent of the
large-scale unique wood sculptures that Indiana has created since the very
beginning of his career. Together they illustrate the consistent
mythologizing
themes of the ocean, the past and the loaded materials and words that
surround
us; those quintessentially Indiana motifs that bind his work together.
Indiana’s wood sculptures
are a lynch pin in his career, the first of
his works to have words included on them, they were also the works which
gained
him his early shooting success. They were included in some of the most
important and trajectory changing exhibitions of the early 1960s including
‘New
Media – New Forms’ at the Martha Jackson Gallery in 1961 and
the same year,
perhaps the most influential exhibition of the decade, ‘The Art of
Assemblage’
at the Museum of Modern Art. In both of these exhibitions Indiana’s
works were
selected as the heirs of modernist ideas begun decades
before.
This exhibition serves as an
updated in-depth follow up to the 1984
exhibition of Indiana’s wood works at the National Museum of American
Art at
the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C.
This will be the first public
exhibition of many of the works outside of
Indiana’s studio and the first exhibition of Indiana’s unique
sculptures
outside of the United States.
Robert Indiana (b.1928) has been
an important figure in art history for
the past five decades. Central to the emergence of pop art in the early
1960s,
he is included in every major post-war museum collection in the world.
This
exhibition precedes a full retrospective of Indiana’s work at the
Whitney
Museum of American Art in Autumn 2013.
This exhibition will be
accompanied by a publication with extensive
historical interviews, documentary images and texts by Joachim
Pissarro,
director of the Hunter College Galleries and former curator of paintings
and
sculpture at the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
An opening reception will be
held on June 8 from 5:00pm to 7:00pm. Dr.
Evvgenia Petrova, Deputy Director of the State Russian Museum will
deliver
opening remarks.
For all media inquiries, interview request with Mathias Rastorfer, co-owner
of Galerie Gmurzynska, please contact:
STATE
Public Relations at +1(646)714.2520
Ryan
Urcia, ryan@statepr.com
Kristina Ratliff,
kristina@statepr.com
A PDF copy of the publication and additional
high res images available upon request.
