Robert Longo

The Mediality of Drawing and the Visual Analysis of Historical Crises in the Work of Robert Longo

The American artist Robert Longo (born 1953), a key figure of the Pictures Generation, is one of the most influential figures in contemporary art. In his monumental, hyperrealistic charcoal drawings, he deconstructs media-driven visual worlds and creates visual codes for social power structures and the collective myths of modernity. This artistic development and cross-media practice has been continuously documented on film by the IKS Düsseldorf (Institute for Art Documentation and Scenography) since 2002, beginning with the institutional reception of the ‘Freud Cycle’ at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld.

The processual and methodological foundations of his work were revealed, amongst other places, at the Galerie Hans Mayer in Düsseldorf in 2009. There, Longo presented not only recent works but also the primary photographic source material from 1980, which served as the conceptual basis for his famous series ‘Men in the Cities’. These images document the deliberate transition from photography to drawing: by physically transferring fleeting, staged photographs of abrupt bodily twitches into the laborious, materially dense process of charcoal drawing, Longo transforms the original medium into a monumental, almost sculptural visual form.

A cross-epochal extension of this image-analytical approach was evident in the exhibition “PROOF” (2018 at the Deichtorhallen, Hamburg), curated by Kate Fowle in collaboration with the artist. The exhibition placed Longo’s works in a diachronic dialogue with the etchings of Francisco Goya (1746–1828) and the revolutionary films of Sergei Eisenstein (1898–1948). All three artists are united by their endeavour to act as chroniclers of their respective eras and to visually reflect on profound historical crises – from the Napoleonic Wars through the Russian Revolution to the global conflicts of the 21st century. In doing so, Longo’s large-scale drawings slow down the mass-media consumption of images and, through their physical presence, compel the viewer to take an analytical look at the reality they document.

A documentary by Ralph Goertz about the artist is due to be released in 2027.