Robert Indiana's 'AHAVA' Sculpture Gifted to Hampton Synagogue

Robert Indiana was born Robert Clark in New Castle, Indiana on September 13, 1928. In 1958, two years after moving to New York City he changed his name. Indiana quickly became acknowledged as one of the most creative artists of his generation and his famous artwork “LOVE” has become a cultural icon. Examples of sculpture from his LOVE series have been installed across the globe in museums and public spaces, sharing its widespread universal message and joy.

1966 was a major moment in the artist’s career with the success of his LOVE image.

Love was a subject of great spiritual significance for the artist.

Initially experimenting with a composition of stacked letters in a series of 1964 drawings, Indiana subsequently turned this inventive design, into a series of paintings and sculpture.

In 1977, Indiana conceived his artwork “AHAVA,” using the Hebrew word for “love” in the same distinctive quadripartite composition that he had developed in the mid-1960s for his iconic LOVE image.

The work expresses Indiana’s unique approach to sculptural form, translating the two-dimensional written word into a monumental sculpture with precisely rendered hard edges.

The artist created a monumental 12-foot-high Cor-Ten steel version of AHAVA for the Israel Museum in Jerusalem in 1977.

Dramatically displayed in the museum’s Isamu Noguchi-designed sculpture garden, the brown rust color of the material against the blue sky creates a marked contrast between the earthly and heavenly, symbolizing two different aspects of love.

AHAVA, also serves as a memorial tribute to Bishop James A. Pike and exemplifies the importance of the spiritual aspect of love to Indiana.

Pike, who died in the Israeli desert and for whom Indiana worked at the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York, had much to do with the artist’s involvement in and treatment of the subject of love.

In AHAVA, the effect of stacking the characters in a two-by-two arrangement, separating them with a vertical rather than horizontal line, points to the connection between divinity and love.

The characters on the right are the first two letters of the Hebrew alphabet, which read consecutively spell “av,” meaning father, while the two characters on the left represent one of the acronyms for God in Hebrew.

An AHAVA sculpture has been gifted to the Hampton Synagogue, to be installed on its newly completed campus in Westhampton Beach.

A dedication ceremony is taking place on September 29 and Donna Schneier, mother of Hampton Synagogue’s  Rabbi Marc Schneier, will interview Simon Salama-Caro.

Simon Salama-Caro became Indiana’s exclusive agent in 1995, and helped the artist to fulfill his long-held vision to complete the editions from his sculpture series: LOVE, ART, AHAVA, and ONE Through ZERO (The Ten Numbers), which were conceived in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s.

In 1998, Indiana, who died in 2018, added his sculpture “AMOR” to this program.

Entrusted by the artist to prepare his Catalogue Raisonné, Salama-Caro is considered the leading authority on the artist’s work and will continue with his family to actively assist in future exhibition programming and legacy building projects.

In 2022, Salama-Caro established The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative, which aims to increase awareness of and appreciation for the depth and breadth of the work of Robert Indiana.

For more information, go to robertindiana.com.