Robert Indiana: Alchemy

Almine Rech Paris presents Alchemy, Robert Indiana’s first monographic exhibition with the gallery, organised in collaboration with The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative. Alongside the exhibition, a monumental LOVE sculpture by the artist – LOVE WALL (1966–2006) – is on view as part of the public programme of Art Basel Paris. Indiana himself described his technique, when it succeeded, as a happy transmutation: of the lost into the found, junk into art, the neglected into the wanted, the unloved into the loved, dross into gold – in short, alchemy. Transformation lies at the heart of Indiana’s work. From the weathered timber, rusted wheels, discarded architectural fragments and commercial stencils he gathered around Coenties Slip in Lower Manhattan, to the hard-edge paintings and monumental word sculptures for which he became famous, he repeatedly turned the overlooked and the ordinary into charged artistic form. His own account of this process offers a key to the material, formal and symbolic logic of his art, in which found objects, signs, language, memory and personal history are continually remade. The exhibition approaches the material qualities of his paint, supports and sculptures as signs of modernism, placing Indiana within a material-based history of modern art that runs from William Turner through Gustave Courbet and Jean Dubuffet to Claes Oldenburg and Joseph Beuys in the second half of the twentieth century. Indiana’s visual vocabulary has been characterised as that of a formalist, a geometer and a poet – bound together by geometry, identity and memory. On salvaged wood, the poet’s written word condenses into a spiritual sign. Every element insists on its own “thingness”: nothing stands in for anything else, and the word is not a substitute for the object but the object itself – the word become image. In his work, the rough materiality of found matter sits in productive tension with the flawless surfaces of the hard-edge paintings and the LOVE sculptures. Out of found materials, words, numbers, signs and forms emerges a body of work driven by contradiction and of lasting significance. The technique that makes these transformations possible is the alchemy Indiana named in 1961, at the height of New York’s building boom, when trash became art, the neglected became wanted and the unloved became loved – a process rooted in the moment of its emergence, yet reaching into our present and a still unwritten future.