Robert Longo

The US-American drawing artist Robert Longo was born on January 7, 1953 in New York. Robert Longo is famous for his black-and-white drawings, which captivate the viewer extremely impressively through their photorealistic representation and the chosen large format. From 1973 to 1975 he studied art at the State College in Buffalo. Here the experimental filmmakers Paul Sharits and Hollis Frampton awakened his interest in photography and the art of film, especially the films of Sergei Eisenstein. With fellow students Charles Clough, Nancy Dwyer, and Cindy Sherman, Robert Longo founded the Hallwalls Contemporary Arts Center in Buffalo in 1974, which still exists today, where they organized exhibitions with Vito Acconci, John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Robert Irwin, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Serra, among others. Since the mid-1970s, Robert Longo has had a close friendship with Cindy Sherman, who studied with him at Buffalo State College. Artists of the Pictures Generation in New York. In 1977 Robert Longo moves to New York City with Cindy Sherman and becomes assistant to Vito Acconci and Dennis Oppenheim. In the same year, Robert Longo takes part in the group exhibition "Pictures" at Artist's Space in New York, which focuses on the young generation of artists, the so-called Pictures Generation, turning away from Minimalism and Conceptualism and towards a new figuration inspired by the mass media, film, television and magazine images. Robert Longo's works also reveal the critical zeitgeist of the decade toward U.S. politics and a distaste for the excesses of capitalism. In addition to drawings, he also produced photographs, paintings, sculptures, performances and films. Robert Longo became widely known with his first solo exhibition in 1981 at the Metro Pictures Gallery, where he showed the drawing series "Men in the Cities," depictions of absurdly contorted bodies. Master of black and white draftsmanship. The beginning of the Gulf War and the crisis of the American art market cause Robert Longo to go to Paris in the early 1990s. In 1994 he returns to the USA. In 1995, Robert Longo directs the progress pessimistic action thriller "Johnny Mnemonic", based on a cyberpunk short story by William Gibson. The film reviews of this SF bestseller adaptation praise the film as visually impressive, but are otherwise predominantly negative. It was not until 1999 that Robert Longo focused on his black-and-white, photorealistic drawings with charcoal, ink and graphite, with which he received worldwide attention. He now created the famous series with waves ("Monsters"), forests ("Et in Arcadia Ego"), sharks ("Perfect Gods"), children's faces ("Beginning of the World") and similarly iconic motifs, whose large-format individual images in stark contrast of light and dark and of monumental effect are now traded at top prices. The most recent series, "The Destroyer Cycle," again features exemplary motifs for Robert Longo's deeply skeptical and critical view of politics and society. Titles such as "Ferguson Police, August 13, 2014" (2014), "Bullet Hole in Window, January 7, 2015" (2015/16), "Refugees at Mediterranean Sea, Sub-Saharan Migrants, July 25, 2017" (2018) or "1st Amendment" (2018) point specifically to events in contemporary history on which Robert Longo's images shine a spotlight. Robert Longo's works are in the world's most important museums such as the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York, the Broad Collection, Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, the Centre Pompidou in Paris or the Albertina in Vienna. In 1982 and 1987 Robert Longo participated in Documenta 7 and 8 in Kassel and in 1997 in the Venice Biennale. In 2005 Robert Longo receives the Kaiserring of the city of Goslar. Robert Longo lives and works in New York. He is married to the German actress Barbara Sukowa.