Best known for his photorealistic drawings, Longo explores imagery within a complex social and cultural forces. Robert Longo was born in 1953, in Brooklyn, New York, and has had a childhood fascination with mass media: movies, television, magazines, and comic books, which continue to deeply influence his art. One of the quintessential artists of the 1980s, Longo is perhaps best known for the writhing, dancing figures in his iconic Men in the Cities series.

The American artist´s drawings are, perhaps, his most iconic. They are as much about the content they depict as they are about the artist´s intense devotion to the practice of drawing. His amazingly deep, anthracite charcoal drawings show emotional motives. Perhaps the best known photorealist series of Robert Longo´s is Men in the Cities, depicting contorted, life-size human figures in an urban setting. Robert Longo´s art focuses on his never-ending investigation of the themes of power and authority, which also permeate his series of blackened American flags (Black Flags, 1989–91), and oversized handguns (Bodyhammers, 1993–95). Longo´s series, Monsters, which depict massive breaking waves, and The Sickness of Reason, featuring atomic bomb blasts, followed in 2002 and 2004. It was during the 1980s that Robert Longo started to produce editions, mainly lithographs. He then gradually developed a high-end print technique, Pigment Print, which allows him to reproduce his drawings perfectly. Robert Longo´s prints capture the same level of detail and emotional impact of the original drawings.

Robert Longo

Robert Longo is known for large-scale, hyperrealistic charcoal portraits that consider power, authority, and social unrest.

Having been fascinated from his childhood by the world of media and its powerful influence, be it film, television, magazines or comics, Robert Longo explores these themes working and reworking on the images to give them velvety, deep, blackened expanses and sharply contrasting whites; his forms are at once representational and softly elusive.

The sources for the creation of "Cadillac" come from Longo´s childhood. His father was an accountant and had a weekend job for Destefano Brothers Construction Company, whose owners drove Cadillacs. The artist´s father brought one of their used Cadillacs and Robert Longo was fascinated by this car, which represented for him everything postwar America, from Marilyn Monroe and John Wayne to the atomic bomb and the space program.

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“ I wanted the Cadillac to look as if it was sinking deep into the black abyss of time and space; the coffin of a bygone era, the phantom vessel on its journey down to Hades. „

—Robert Longo