Robert Indiana: The American Dream
Pace Gallery, New York
Though August 15, 2025
Apogee, 1970
© The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative, courtesy Pace Gallery
Pace presents Robert Indiana: The American Dream, a major exhibition including seminal examples of paintings and sculpture created by the artist beginning in the early 1960s and developed throughout subsequent decades of his artistic career, to be shown at its 540 West 25th Street gallery in New York. Examining Indiana’s critique of the duality of the American Dream—both its promise and its privations—this exhibition highlights the connections between the artist’s personal history and the social, political, and cultural realities of postwar America. Reflecting on the critical and political underpinnings of Indiana’s work, as well as his enduring impact as an artist, Pace’s presentation includes loans from several prominent institutions.
Pace’s exhibition in New York is accompanied by a new catalogue from Pace Publishing, which is shed light on Indiana’s lifelong artistic engagement with both the aspirations of the American dream and its dark underbelly–the repressed dimensions of American history and society, from colonialism to materialism and commodification. Among the works on view are the 1961 painting The Calumet, which features the names of Native American tribes, acknowledging the presence of Indigenous life and culture within the subconscious of America; The Black Marilyn (1967/1998), a painting that speaks to the commodification of celebrity and desire in American mass media in the 1960s; and the painted bronze sculpture The American Dream (1992/2015), bearing fundamental words of the human condition: “HUG,” “ERR,” “EAT,” and “DIE.”
Oliver Shultz, Chief Curator of Pace Gallery, says: “In many ways, Indiana is an artist whose work has been eclipsed by its own fame. This exhibition is about rediscovering the real Indiana, the radical and probing artist he really was. Both a pioneer and an outlier in the 1960s, the impact of his efforts to imbue formalist abstraction with content is difficult to overstate. Indiana’s work of the sixties reveals the true nature of the American dream as a dialectic: even as it uplifts, it also oppresses. Even as it offers the grandest of aspirations, it remains founded in a history of violence that lies embedded in language itself.”
Pace’s presentation also includes works from Indiana’s iconic LOVE series, recontextualizing this important and well-known image within his broader practice and tying this motif to other words and ideas—including “EAT” and “DIE”—that recur across his paintings and sculptures, symbols of both personal and universal significance in Indiana’s work.
PACE GALLERY NEW YORK
540 West 25th Street, New York City
Robert Indiana: The American Dream
Pace Gallery, New York, May 9 – August 15, 2025