{"id":357,"date":"2015-06-29T15:21:27","date_gmt":"2015-06-29T15:21:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/?p=357"},"modified":"2015-09-01T17:00:29","modified_gmt":"2015-09-01T17:00:29","slug":"wow-work-of-the-week-3","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wow\/wow-work-of-the-week-3","title":{"rendered":"WOW! – Work of the Week 6\/29\/15"},"content":{"rendered":"

Robert Indiana, Zinnia<\/em>, from Garden of Love<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

\"Robert<\/a>

Robert Indiana Zinnia, from Garden of Love 1982<\/p><\/div>\n

Robert Indiana
\nZinnia, from Garden of Love
\n1982
\nScreenprint
\n26 5\/8 x 26 5\/8 in.
\nEdition of 100
\nThis piece is\u00a0signed, titled, dated and numbered in pencil.<\/p>\n

About This Work:<\/p>\n

Robert Indiana is most recognized for his very pop art LOVE works.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

Zinnia\u00a0<\/em>is one of 6 works from Robert Indiana’s\u00a0Garden of Love\u00a0<\/em>portfolio. Each of the six works is inspired and named after a flower.<\/p>\n

\n

About Robert Indiana:<\/p>\n

\u201cThere have been many American SIGN painters, but there never were any American sign PAINTERS.\u201d \u00a0 This sums up Robert Indiana’s position in the world of contemporary art. He has taken the everyday symbols of roadside America and made them into brilliantly colored geometric pop art. In his work he has been an ironic commentator on the American scene. Both his graphics and his paintings have made cultural statements on life and, during the rebellious 1960s, pointed political statements as well.<\/p>\n

Born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana, in 1928, he adopted the name of his native state as a pseudonymous surname early in his career.<\/p>\n

What Indiana calls “sculptural poems”,\u00a0 his work often consists of bold, simple, iconic images, especially numbers and short words like “EAT”, “HUG”, and “LOVE”.<\/p>\n

Rather than using symbols from the mass media, Indiana makes images of words that focus on identity.\u00a0 Using them in bold block letters in vivid colors, he has enticed his viewers to look at the commonplace from a new perspective.<\/p>\n

Despite his unique methods, several important aspects of Indiana’s works clearly identify him as a Pop artist. He manages to give a direct and honest description of American culture while appearing cool and uninvolved, much as Warhol did by simply reproducing images of superstars and soup can labels. \u00a0In his most famous series Indiana took familiar words, usually three to five letters long, and repeated, reflected, or divided them. The simple familiarity of these words and the flattened manner in which Indiana presents them demonstrates the Pop art accessibility of content; viewers need not read much past the surface.<\/p>\n

However, what distinguishes Indiana from his “Pop” colleagues is the depth of his personal engagement with his subject matter.\u00a0 Indiana’s works all speak to the vital forces that have shaped American culture in the late half of the 20th century: personal and national identity, political and social upheaval and stasis, the rise of consumer culture, and the pressures of history.\u00a0 He uses his art it to both celebrate and criticize the national way of life.<\/p>\n

By presenting familiar words in new ways, he asks the viewer to reevaluate assumptions and emotions associated with those words.\u00a0 For example, no longer does the word “eat” simply describe an act, but a whole set of social conditions and practices associated with that act. Viewers might see the intimacy of eating and its central role in family, community, and romantic rituals or they might understand the negative aspects of eating in a society where high-fat, sugar-rich diets are the norm.<\/p>\n

The same is true of Indiana’s most famous piece, his LOVE <\/b>sculpture of 1966. By using block letters in bold, bright colors and dividing the word in half, he presents “love” in an unfamiliar way, thus asking the viewer what this familiar term means personally. His preoccupation with LOVE became an exploration of complicated relationships and his spiritual nature.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Robert Indiana, Zinnia, from Garden of Love Robert Indiana Zinnia, from Garden of Love 1982 Screenprint 26 5\/8 x 26 5\/8 in. Edition of 100 This piece is\u00a0signed, titled, dated and numbered in pencil. About This Work: Robert Indiana is … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18],"tags":[16,79,14,84,133,122,134,8,83,9,131,132,15,23,47,130,88,222,17],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=357"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":442,"href":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/357\/revisions\/442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=357"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=357"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/gsfineart.com\/gallery-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=357"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}