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.

The present art work is an impressive example of Robert Longo's artistic output and assembles seven works as digital prints in a vertical row. The compilation is comprised of: Untitled (Pillow from Consulting Room, 1938) 2001, Untitled (Heaven's Hole) 2000, Mike Test (Head of Goya) 2003, Untitled (Ophelia #9) 2002, Untitled (Saturn) 2006, Untitled (Cassandra) 2008 and Untitled (large black shark portrait) 2008.

The grayscale composition is balanced by a red rose in the center. Each print represents the constantly recurring themes within artist's ouevre such as love, war, beauty, time and the mystery of the being. The waves, the bombs and the roses being the metonymies. Robert Longo describes them as all “things that were existing at the moment of their being: a bomb is supposed to explode, a rose … to bloom and a wave … to crash. "They are at the moment of their fulfillment.”

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“ I think I make art for brave eyes. I don't want to make art that will pat you on the back and tell you everything is going to be okay. I want to make something that's much more confronting. You don't look at it, it looks at you as much as you look at it. „

—Robert Longo