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.

Iceman X is part of 2009 Project Yingxiong (Heroes), in which impressive fighter pilot helmets with an extraordinary level of intricacy and finish are represented.

Longo's works straddle a line between hyper-realistic and disturbingly surreal and they are made exclusively from graphite and charcoal used with extraordinary flair and panache. The helmet is at the same time an abstract and surreal image, with the clouds reflecting in mask, and a real symbol of violence and war. Iceman evidences the artist's ongoing concern with the iconography of institutional power structures and political fallout.

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“ It just hit me today that I'm doing all of this epic stuff at this point in my life. (...) I've been dealing with these epic images, and I realized all of a sudden that I grew up in the age of epics. „

—Robert Longo