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.

Longo’s drawings of massive thundering waves carry evocative names of renowned surfing beaches or surfing terms such as “Hell's Gate,” “Dragon’s Head,” and “Godzilla” and they represent a clear climax, pointing to an ecstatic moment of unleashed, sublime force.

Part of the series "Monsters", the representation of the looming crest of exploding power in "Godzilla" is a singular portrait of emotional and physical forces, which drive the viewer to freeze in front of the power of nature and its ungraspable manifestations of pure and genuine lethal beauty.

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“…the roses and the bombs and the waves are things that exist at the moment of their being: a bomb is meant to explode, a rose in born to bloom, a wave is destined to crash. They are at the moment of their fulfillment.„

—Robert Longo