The Shape of the World

Pace is pleased to present at its Hong Kong gallery Robert Indiana: The Shape of the World, an exhibition of work by celebrated American artist Robert Indiana (1928–2018), who first emerged as a key figure in the Pop art movement. On view from March 25 to May 9, this presentation, coinciding with the 2025 edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, will include important sculpture, paintings, and prints from throughout Indiana's career, showcasing the graphic visual vocabulary that made him one of the most inventive and enduring figures in the history of American art. Robert Indiana:The Shape of the World will focus on Indiana's deep interest in numerology, literature, geometry, colour, and form, and will be Pace's first exhibition of the artist's work since it began representing The Robert Indiana Legacy Initiative in 2024.

Following the show in Hong Kong, the gallery will mount a major presentation dedicated to Indiana at its New York flagship in May, featuring a distinct group of rarely seen paintings and sculpture that speak to the flexibility of Indiana's practice and one of the most central themes in his work: the triumph and tragedy of the American dream.

Pace's upcoming exhibition of Indiana's work in Hong Kong will focus on the artist's connection to language and numbers, drawing attention to form and symbolism. Bringing together a curated selection of paintings, sculpture, and prints created by the artist between the 1960s and early 2000s, this presentation will be organised thematically with an emphasis on numerology and the universality of numbers. Holistically, the show will also shed light on the relationship—in terms of both form and scale—between the artist's paintings and sculpture.

Among the works on view will be three of Indiana's painted bronzes, translations of works he conceived in the early 1960s. Referred to by the artist as "herms," after the sculptures that served as boundary markers at crossroads in ancient Greece and Rome, these works feature brightly colored numbers painted using 19th-century brass stencils that Indiana scavenged on the streets of New York. Considering bronze to be one of the most noble of materials in the tradition of sculpture, Indiana selected eight of his herm sculptures to be cast in bronze in 1991. TWO (1960–62, cast 1991), one of the bronze herms in Pace's Hong Kong show, was presented in Robert Indiana: The Sweet Mystery, an official Collateral Event of the 60th Venice Biennale in 2024 and one of the most significant exhibitions of his work in Italy to date.