8

Robert Indiana

1962

Oil on canvas

Minneapolis Institute of Art

Robert Indiana’s painting of the number eight is colorful, bold, and simple. It is not difficult to believe that, at the start of his artistic career, he referred to himself as a sign painter. This wasn’t false modesty—he really was interested in the potential of letters and numbers to be transformed with color and design into signposts of mass culture. Evoking the signs of our daily lives, Indiana fused images from small-town America with the visual language of high art. The result was what he called “verbal-visual” forms. Taken from their original contexts, Indiana’s signs expose the power of symbols in our quest for meaning. Gall