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.

Interior Apartment Front Door with Bars, 1938 comes from “The Freud Cycle” which is based on the photographs by Edmund Engleman of Sigmund Freud’s consultation room and adjacent apartment in Vienna, Austria, during May of 1938. A catalog of the photographs, titled "Bergasse 19", was was given to Longo by his friend Harry Jancovici. The images from the catalogue inspired Longo for his next work, which became, as he states, “a psychoanalysis of Freud’s apartment."

Longo draw the attention to the absurdity of the historical events by emphasizing that Freud was working on his psychoanalysis during the time, when Nazis were in Vienna. The artist got absorbed by the black and white aesthetics of the images. Interior Apartment Front Door with Bars, 1938 is one of the results of his contemplation. This monochromatic iris print presents the eery atmosphere of the apartment, captivating by its sinister solitude.

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“ The book, with its extraordinary photographs, sat around my studio and eventually insinuated itself into my consciousness, pushing me to take action. „

—Robert Longo