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.

Robert Longo continues to explore the potential of his crisp, breath-taking style, particularly through imagery of powerful figures and events. In Ivy Mike, the blackness of a calm sea reflects the blast of a massive nuclear explosion. Here the artist explores an object of fascination and control by depicting the induced event – sublime and atrocious at once – in minute detail.

The artist has said: ”I stumbled on the bombs. I remember showing my kids a picture of Nagasaki, and I asked them what it was. They thought it was a weather effect.”

Part of "The Sickness of Reason" series, this powerful asrtwork concentrates the essence of an uncontrollable and dangerous nature, capturing the tension encapsulated in one of the most complicated and emotionally charged subjects of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries: nuclear weapons.

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