Paul Kasmin Gallery
297 Tenth Ave, New York
Robert Indiana, ONE through ZERO, 1978-2003, polychrome aluminum, 33 3/4 x 33 x 17 inches each, 85.7 x 83.8 x 43.2 cm, Edition of 3 + 2 APs. © Morgan Arts Foundation / Artist Rights Society, ARS, New York.
Paul Kasmin Gallery presents an exhibition in remembrance of Robert Indiana, whose death in May 2018 marked the end of a seven-decade-long career. In response to the news, Paul Kasmin said: “Robert Indiana will remain alive through the great legacy he has left behind. He was unlike any other person I have ever met. A genius.”
ONE through ZERO is an installation of a single work made up of ten individual sculptures, each 18 inches high. It articulates the artist’s fascination with numbers as the most fundamental organizing principles of the world. “Numbers fill my life,” he has said. “We are immersed in numbers from the day we are born.”
The work takes on a multitude of references that simultaneously hone in on autobiographical significances and conjure universal metaphors related to the sequential nature of life and death. Many of these references manifest in Indiana’s dramatic use of contrasting colors—an impetus that was heavily influenced by his close friend and peer Ellsworth Kelly. With ONE through ZERO, vivid greens, blues, yellows, reds and whites vie for attention, shining in high gloss, standing as pillars that the artist distinctly associates with the various stages of life from birth, infancy, youth, and adolescence to the autumn of life, a sense of warning and ultimately the end of the cycle.
Robert Indiana was born in 1928 in New Castle, Indiana, and died at his home in Vinalhaven, Maine in May, 2018. Indiana’s work has been featured in numerous solo and group exhibitions around the world, including a 2013 retrospective at the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. A larger edition of ONE through ZERO is currently on view at the Albright-Knox exhibition Robert Indiana: A Sculpture Retrospective. ONE through ZERO’s Cor-ten steel counterpart was exhibited at Philip Johnson’s historic Glass House landmark in Connecticut (2017) and LOVE WALL was installed on Park Avenue, 57th Street, New York (2008) as well as at the Duomo in Milan (2008).
Indiana’s work is represented in prominent institutional collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of Art, New York; Art Institute of Chicago; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Philadelphia Museum of Art; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; National Gallery of Art, the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden and the Smithsonian Museum of American Art in Washington, D.C.; Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Buffalo; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; Menil Collection, Houston; Cleveland Museum of Art; The Israel Museum, Jerusalem; and Tate, London, among many other institutions.
