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.

Like an Old Master draftsman, Longo achieves an extremely emotional range through his use of chiaroscuro. His Photorealist drawings are based on images borrowed from the world around him, being media containing a political and social statement, or nature and mysteries.

"Horsehead Nebula" is a singular portrait of emotional and physical forces, which drive the viewer to freeze in front of the beauty of nature and its ungraspable manifestations. The beautiful horsehead-like formation of clouds of gas and dust that give the Horsehead Nebula its name take center stage in this amazing image. The nebula is located about 5,000 light years from Earth and reminds the viewer of the immensity of the universe and the human being´s position in it.

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“ My drawings are like sculptures, when I draw with graphite I smudge it with my fingers, move it around physically, it's like clay. Painting is painting on the surface, covering up, where drawing is putting the picture into the paper like a photograph. „

—Robert Longo