?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 12,000 - $ 18,000
ROBERT INDIANA LOVE, Indiana Stable May 66.
Pencil on translucent wove paper, 1966. 1015x780 mm; 40x31 inches. Signed in pencil, lower right recto.
Ex-collection Stephen Poleskie, Chiron Press, New York.
Indiana's (1928-2018) drawing for the color screenprint poster produced to announce his 1966 solo exhibition (which the artist referred to as his "LOVE show") at Stable Gallery, New York. Indiana developed the first incarnation of LOVE in 1964 as a design for a personal holiday greeting that he sent to his friends, and then refined as a printed Christmas card for The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the following year. In 1966, the artist debuted major paintings of the motif at Stable Gallery, New York, for which he made this drawing as a maquette for the gallery poster.
According to Indiana, "The word LOVE got to be the way it is because I have a kind of a passion about symmetry and the dividing of things into equal parts. The word LOVE is that way because those four letters best fit a square if the square is squared by that particular arrangement. And it was really that sort of a necessity for a very compact form that I came upon that arrangement . . . With the red, blue and green paintings the interaction in the eye is of such a nature that with the slightest change of light the fields automatically interchange, the positive becomes negative and vice versa, with almost a violent effect in the eye."
