Robert Longo: Searchers
Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac, London
October 9 – November 9, 2024
Untitled (Hunter), 2024
© Robert Longo, courtesy the artist and Pace Gallery
The idea of montage has always been in my vocabulary… When you put images next to each other, what happens? I’m not interested in pastiche or collage. I’m interested in collision. - Robert Longo, 2024
Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac present Searchers, a two-part exhibition of new work by Robert Longo, on view at both Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac’s London galleries. Each presentation includes a new Combine—monumental, five-panel multimedia wall works that return to the artist’s 1981-89 series of the same name—in addition to a large-scale charcoal drawing, a small graphite drawing, and a film. By rupturing and reassembling the symbols of a collective cultural mythology, these works advance Robert Longo’s long-standing investigation into the relationship between the individual to society.
Robert Longo is widely recognized for his ambitiously scaled, hyperrealistic charcoal drawings. These monochromatic works often depict images from art historical sources, as well as scenes of protest, civil unrest, violence, war, and other social and political events. A key figure in the Pictures Generation of the 1970s and 1980s, his critical relationship to the media culture of his formative years has only intensified amid ever-more sophisticated methods of image distribution and an increasingly tumultuous global climate. Sourcing from television, film, news photography, personal photographs, and the internet, Robert Longo carefully selects, alters, and enlarges these images, freezing their immediacy through the deliberate, time-intensive process of drawing. In doing so, he prompts viewers to reconsider their roles as consumers within today's image-saturated landscape.
Informed by Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage and John Berger’s influential text Ways of Seeing (1972), Searchers grew out of Robert Longo’s desire for his charcoal drawings to be and do more. For the exhibitions at Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac, he has revisited his Combines, which he envisions as a tool in which to overcome the visual and conceptual limitations of two-dimensional images. Referring to Robert Rauschenberg’s earlier series of the same name, these large-scale, three-dimensional works bring together a range of materials (such as paint, stone, plaster, cast bronze, glass) and media (such as sculpture, drawing, film, photography) in a single work. The disparate parts are arranged in the way that Robert Longo believes we encounter the world: as a bombardment of images and information that pervade our environment and consciousness.
The five-panel work at Pace, Untitled (Hunter) (2024), is composed of the following, from left to right: a film still of Keanu Reeves from the movie John Wick, a hyper-violent film about vengeance; a cascading sculptural relief made up of dense vertical strips of black and red plexiglass with dangerous, irregular, and highly reflective edges; a painting using 3D printing of cut-and-pasted protest images; a video of a sparkling blue-black current installed behind a steel frame with seven horizontal openings receding in perspective; and a charcoal drawing based on a grainy telephoto image of refugees at the Belarus-Polish border, appearing like a ring from Dante's Inferno.
Internally, Robert Longo’s Combines resist simple resolution. Each constituent image of Untitled (Hunter) captures a moment of acute, visually violent motion. Their formal symbolism, suspended like a staccato edit in a film, undergoes a further stage of translation as they are entwined with their respective mediums. By applying scale and sequential structure to these familiar yet incompatible images, Longo challenges the viewer to interpret the work and, by extension, the expansive array of images that surround us. In this endeavor, Robert Longo echoes Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s theory that ‘the medium is the message,’ highlighting how these images are mediated shapes our understanding and response to them.
Accompanying the Combine at Pace is Untitled (Black Peony) (2024), a large-scale charcoal drawing. Robert Longo describes flowers as “at once feminine yet masculine; sweet yet venomous; explosive yet temporal events.” Another drawing, Untitled (After Navalny) (2024), based on a photograph of a protest following the unlawful imprisonment and subsequent death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, is also included in the exhibition. Measuring 6 x 8 1/8 inches (15.2 x 20.6 cm), this work once again transforms scale to challenge the viewer’s process of meaning-making. The final element of the exhibition is a black-and-white, ultra-fast-paced, looped film presenting the onslaught of the image storm from one day of international news: July 4, 2024. The rapid flood of images is interrupted randomly by computer-generated stops, creating an experience with no beginning and no end, only different ways of looking and seeing.
Concurrent with his exhibitions in London, Robert Longo is the subject of a major retrospective at the ALBERTINA Museum in Vienna, on view through January 26, 2025. At the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, the artist is presenting work from the last ten years within the broader scope of his career and in comparison to other art historical genres such as history painting. This exhibition, titled The Acceleration of History, is on view from October 25, 2024, through February 23, 2025.
ROBERT LONGO - BIOGRAPHY
Robert Longo (b. 1953, Brooklyn, New York) grew up in Long Island, New York. ln 1973, Robert Longo enrolled at Buffalo State College, where he worked for artists Paul Sharits and Hollis Frampton, who introduced him to structuralist filmmaking. Along with Charles Clough, Longo also co-founded Hallwalls (1974-ongoing), an alternative non-profit art exhibition space where he organized shows and talks with artists such as John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Robert Irwin, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Serra.
Robert Longo has had one-persan exhibitions at the Musée d'art moderne et d'art contemporain, Nice; Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany; Albertina, Vienna; Isetan Museum of Art, Tokyo; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Menil Collection, Houston. He has been included in Documenta 7 and 8, the 1983 and 2004 Whitney Biennials, and the 47th Venice Biennale.
Continuing to work with characteristic scale, precision, and perceptiveness, Robert Longo achieves visually striking images of people, places, events, and animais. He slows his images dawn through the venerable medium of charcoal, often capturing images that would not otherwise be possible ta see with the hu man eye. Through his large-scale hyperrealistic charcoal drawings, Longo has cemented himself as a preeminent artist of his generation. His work is held in multiple collections worldwide including, The Albertina Museum, Vienna; The Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Fogg Art Museum, Harvard University, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Tate Modern; London, and The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
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