Robert Longo's works are held in numerous collections around the world, including: The Albertina Museum Vienna, Austria; Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois; Center Pompidou, Paris; Harvard Art Museums/Fogg Museum, Cambridge, Massachusetts; and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, California; and the Museum of Modern Art, New York. In September 2024, the Albertina Museum, Vienna will host a retrospective of Longo's works and in October 2024, the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin will present a solo exhibition of works created between 2014 and 2024.
For his models, Robert Longo uses photographs that record dramatic situations at the moment of their maximum tension. The artist is interested here in the representation of powerin nature, politics, history. It uses visual material that has been reproduced thousands of times and has long been part of pop culture, of our collective visual memory. Longo isolates and reduces the motifs so as to increase their visual impact to a higher power. By enlarging the subject and intensifying the lighting in a dramatic chiaroscuro, we are faced with gigantic, previously unseen theatrical images. Longo draws on existing images, refers to second-hand reality and creates impressive “copies” of the original black and white photographs, which pale in comparison to their transformation into colossal charcoal drawings. The dramatic light and shadow effects of the charcoal drawings emphasize the plasticity of the objects and spatial depth. They make the motif appear both real and unreal. The deep black of the charcoal rubbed on the paper swallows up all the light. Paradoxically, Longo is ultimately capable, like no one else, of evoking luminosity and radiant light, transparency and materiality differentiated with the black of charcoal.
Robert Longo was born in 1953 in Brooklyn and grew up on Long Island, New York. He graduated from high school in 1970, just weeks after the Ohio National Guard massacred several students at Kent State University who were protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia.
