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.

"The Box" is part of the Robert Longo’s famous "Monsters" series, the drawings of massive thundering waves, each carrying the name of a well-known surfing spots and having individual and emotional context. These baroque waves are a climax, pointing to an ecstatic moment of unleashed, sublime force.

"Monsters" series mesmerize by its photo-realist aesthetic and velvety charcoal texture. The waves are the romantic infiniteness which devoures the individual subject and leaves it struck with its own limitations by pointing to a larger picture in which all individuality disappears in front of the ungraspable. In 2004 the "Monsters" was part of Whitney Biennial.

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“The waves are things that exist at the moment of their being [...]. They are at the moment of their fulfillment.„

—Robert Longo