“Art is an attempt to try and understand our own contemporary situation through making images that are completely personal, while also addressing our social context.” - Robert Longo

 

Robert Longo (born January 7, 1953) is a preeminent American contemporary artist, filmmaker, and musician, widely recognized for his monumental, hyperrealistic charcoal drawings. A central figure of the "Pictures Generation" in the 1970s and 80s, Longo’s work explores the intersections of power, authority, and mass media. Longo’s practice is defined by its dramatic scale and monochromatic palette, often utilizing deep black charcoal to "carve" images out of white paper. 

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Beginning in 1999, Longo began making large-scale charcoal wave drawings, his Monsters series, followed by The Freud Cycle, depicting Sigmund Freud’s consultation room and apartment in Nazi-occupied Vienna. On the one hand, the stormy seas counterbalance the cool rationalism of psychoanalysis, while on the other, the pairing suggests inner tempests. These images are what Longo considers “absolutes,” embodiments of the collective unconscious. In 2009, he completed a cycle of drawings of other absolutes—bombs, nebulae, roses, sleeping children, and sharks—that he called The Essentials, and which form a poetic creation myth. Longo continues to work with characteristic scale, precision, and perceptiveness, achieving visually striking images of people, places, events, and animals. The artist slows things down through the venerable medium of charcoal, often capturing images that would not otherwise be possible to see with the human eye. Through his large-scale hyperrealistic charcoal drawings, Longo has cemented himself as a preeminent artist of his generation. Longo’s body of work, A History of the Present, which he began in 2020, is informed by the Coronavirus Pandemic, the nation’s political upheaval, our tenuous ecological future, fueled by the artist’s personal experiences. Through this group of large-scale charcoal drawings, Longo seeks to focus on the power of the viewer and the individual’s capacity to create change, a celebration of freedom of expression.

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Longo’s work is held in multiple public collections worldwide, including The Albertina Museum, Vienna; The Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, among many others. A landmark traveling retrospective, Robert Longo, was held at The Albertina Museum from September 2024 through January 2025, and is on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, through August 31, 2025.

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Longo now lives and works in New York. He is represented by Pace Gallery and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac; London, Paris, Salzburg, Seoul.