Robert Indiana
The Shape of the World
Pace Gallery, Hong Kong
Mach 25 - May 9, 2025
Ginkgo, 2000
© Star of Hope Foundation, Vinalhaven, Maine
Pace presents Robert Indiana: The Shape of the World, an exhibition of work by celebrated American artist ROBERT INDIANA (1928–2018), who first emerged as a key figure in the Pop art movement, at its Hong Kong gallery.
This presentation, coinciding with the 2025 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, includes important sculpture, paintings, and prints from throughout Robert Indiana’s career, showcasing his graphic visual vocabulary that made him one of the most inventive and enduring figures in the history of American art. Robert Indiana: The Shape of the World focuses on Indiana’s deep interest in numerology, literature, geometry, color, and form, and will be Pace’s first exhibition of the artist’s work since it began representing The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative in 2024.
Following the show in Hong Kong, the gallery will mount a major presentation dedicated to Robert Indiana at its New York flagship, featuring a distinct group of rarely seen paintings and sculpture that speak to the flexibility of Indiana’s practice and one of the most central themes in his work: the triumph and tragedy of the American dream.
At the vanguard of Pop art and assemblage, Robert Indiana made use of words and numerals in his bold signature style exploring American identity and iconography as well as the universal power of abstraction. Indiana referred to himself as an “American painter of signs,” developing a visual vocabulary that—imbued with literary, political, and spiritual depth—made him one of the most important figures in the history of art.
Born Robert Clark in the state of Indiana in 1928, he began his career as part of the community of artists—including Ellsworth Kelly, Agnes Martin, James Rosenquist, and Jack Youngerman—working in the Coenties Slip, once a major port on the southeast tip of Manhattan, in the 1950s. The following decade marked a turning point in his career with the success of his famous LOVE image, which debuted at New York’s Stable Gallery and has since become a cultural icon in its own right, remaining as relevant today as when first created 60 years ago. In 1978, Robert Indiana chose to remove himself from the New York art world, settling on the remote island of Vinalhaven in Maine, where he worked until his death in 2018.
“Numbers are ageless, there is no social comment involved, very simply, numbers chart the world’s course,” Robert Indiana once said.
Pace’s exhibition of Indiana’s work in Hong Kong focuses on the artist’s connection to language and numbers, drawing attention to form and symbolism. Bringing together a curated selection of paintings, sculpture, and prints created by the artist between the 1960s and early 2000s, this presentation is organized thematically with an emphasis on numerology and the universality of numbers. Holistically, the show is also shed light on the relationships—in terms of both form and scale—between the artist’s paintings and sculpture.
Among the works on view are three of Indiana’s painted bronzes, translations of works he conceived in the early 1960s. Referred to by the artist as “herms,” after the sculptures that served as boundary markers at crossroads in ancient Greece and Rome, these works feature brightly colored numbers painted using 19th-century brass stencils that Robet Indiana scavenged on the streets of New York. Considering bronze to be one of the most noble of materials in the tradition of sculpture, Indiana selected eight of his herm sculptures to be cast in bronze in 1991. TWO (1960–62, cast 1991), one of the bronze herms in Pace’s Hong Kong show, was presented in Robert Indiana: The Sweet Mystery, an official Collateral Event of the 60th Venice Biennale and one of the most significant exhibitions of his work in Italy to date, in 2024.
The gallery’s exhibition is also highlight two examples of Indiana’s most admired LOVE sculptures—LOVE (Red Outside Blue Inside) and LOVE (Red Outside Gold Inside), both conceived in 1966 and executed in 1999 in polychrome aluminum. Also included is ONE Through ZERO (The Ten Numbers) (1978–2003), a stainless steel work composed of ten individual numbers that reflects the artist’s enduring interest in the symbolic, allegorical, and formal resonances of numbers. Indiana’s number sculptures illuminate the different meanings and associations that numbers can conjure, the relationship between numbers in his art to events in his own life—such as highway routes or buildings where he lived—and more universal ideas about the cycle of life.
Paintings created by Robert Indiana between the 1960s and early 2000s are also featured in Pace’s presentation in Hong Kong. Among these works is one of the first LOVE paintings, a small-scale, 12 x 12 inch work from 1965. Several paintings in the exhibition have unique resonances in Hong Kong: Ginkgo (2000), a hard-edge composition depicting a ginkgo leaf design that Indiana, inspired by the leaves on the trees he saw around the Coenties Slip, began exploring in 1957, and Four Diamond Ping (2003), a dynamic, diamond-shaped work containing the Mandarin word for “peace” as well as biblical phrases in English.
These sculptures and paintings complemented by a selection of ten prints, each featuring one number between zero and nine, that Robert Indiana produced in 2001 and 2011. Derived from his Decade Autoportrait series of paintings, which the artist began in 1971, these works were conceived as portraits of Indiana’s life during the 1960s, each named for a different year in the decade and containing references to important names, places, and events in his world of significance within the artist’s life.
Today, Indiana’s work can be found in the permanent collections of museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York; the Art Institute of Chicago; the National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.; the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; the Menil Collection, Houston; Tate Modern, London; the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin; MUMOK (Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig Wien), Vienna; and the Art Gallery of Ontario, Toronto, among many other institutions around the world.
Established in 2022, The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative aims to increase awareness of and appreciation for the depth and breadth of the work of Robert Indiana and is the leading entity dedicated to the advancement of the artist’s work. Represented worldwide by Pace Gallery, The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative also manages the website www.robertindiana.com and is responsible for The Robert Indiana Catalogue Raisonné, which is now available online www.ricatalogueraisonne.org.
PACE GALLERY - HONG KONG
12/F, H Queen's - 80 Queen's Road Central, Hong Kong
