Robert Longo
New York, NY
ROBERT LONGO
Robert Longo is a New York-based artist, filmmaker, and musician. Born in Brooklyn in 1953, he grew up on Long Island. He earned a B.A. from Buffalo State University New York and moved to New York City in 1977. That same year, he showed in Pictures, curated by Douglas Crimp, the first exhibition to contextualize a young group of artists who were turning away from Minimalism and Conceptualism and instead towards image-making, inspired by newspapers, advertisements, film, and television. Longo became known as a leading protagonist of the "Pictures Generation," working across drawing, photography, painting, sculpture, performance, and film to make provocative critiques of the anesthetizing and seductive effects of capitalism, mediatized wars, and the cult of history in the United States.
Longo has had retrospectives at the Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art, Nice, France; Hamburg Kunstverein, Germany; the Menil Collection, Houston, TX; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, CA; the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago, IL; and the Isetan Museum of Art, Tokyo, Japan. The artist’s works are held in the collections of the Albertina in Vienna, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, The Broad, Los Angeles, the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, among others.
For our Robert Longo profile, The Artist Profile Archive filmed his 2014 shows, Gang of Cosmos at Metro Pictures and Strike the Sun at Petzel Gallery, as well as the 2017 shows, Let the Frame of Things Disjoint at Ropac London and The Destroyer Cycle at Metro Pictures. In addition to filming his Brooklyn Museum exhibit, Proof, Longo was interviewed in his New York City studio in December 2017.
Robert Longo - Death Star - 08:04
“The mind is like chaos, some things burn brighter than others. I go way out, find an idea, and bring it back, but it has to go through a meteor storm of critical criteria. It gets beaten up, and if that idea survives, then I will make it.
We live in this world of an incredible image storm. How do you get people to look at things more carefully? People look at my drawings and say, ‘Oh, they’re photographs’ and someone says, ‘They’re not photographs, they’re charcoal drawings,’ ...that gets people to stop and look closer. That’s the way to get people to look harder, more in-depth.”
Brooklyn Museum
“I think I understand why people collect art… I think I understand possession. The images I make are images I want to possess, it’s like meeting someone that you’re attracted to and there’s a sense you want to possess that person, you’re attracted to the way they look, you want to possess them, making art is a lot like that.”
