Robert Longo: The Weight of Hope @ Pace Gallery, New York

Robert Longo: The Weight of Hope

Pace Gallery, New York

September 12 – October 25, 2025

Pace presents The Weight of Hope, a monumental exhibition by ROBERT LONGO, in New York from September 12 to October 25. As a sequel to the Milwaukee Art Museum’s recent presentation of Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History—curated by Margaret Andera, the institution’s Senior Curator of Contemporary Art—Robert Longo will take over Pace’s entire 540 West 25th Street gallery, exhibiting 26 drawings, three films, two sculptures, and 30 studies across the flagship’s first, second, third, and seventh floors as well as its exterior. The Milwaukee Art Museum’s new catalogue for The Acceleration of History, featuring contributions from Margaret Andera, artist Rashid Johnson, and journalist Tom Teicholz, will be released during the run of Pace’s show and available to purchase on-site at the gallery. A Pace Live performance, featuring musician Rhys Chatham, organized as part the exhibition will take place on Wednesday, September 10, and an opening reception will be held on Thursday, September 11 from 6 to 8 p.m. Both events will be open to the public, and further details will be announced in due course.

The Weight of Hope will highlight Longo’s enduring engagement with social and political happenings in his work across mediums, bringing together large-scale charcoal drawings, films, sculptures, and studies—including private and institutional loans—created between 2014 and 2025. This landmark show at Pace will open on the heels of the artist’s first full-scale Scandinavian survey, on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark through August 31, and his presentation of a new multimedia work at Art Basel Unlimited in June.

Over the past decade, the artist has increasingly turned his focus to images from the media, including coverage of the January 6 United States Capitol attack and the Black Lives Matter movement. Building up his hyper realistic, black-and- white charcoal drawings in layers with painstaking attention to light and shadow, he creates highly detailed works based on news photography as well as images of protests, civil unrest, and war on the Internet. Transforming his source images into epically scaled, emotionally resonant compositions, he reflects on power, violence, and national mythmaking. His works slow down the “image storm” and “culture of impatience” in which we live through the historic and venerable medium of charcoal, encouraging viewers to take time to absorb and process the turbulence of the current moment—both in the US and around the globe—while also proposing hope for the future.

“As artists, we’re reporters,” Robert Longo said in a recent interview for his Louisiana Museum of Modern Art exhibition. “Our job is to report what it’s like to be alive now. We’re one of the few professions left in the world that has the opportunity to try to tell the truth. I feel a moral imperative to preserve the images of our shared dystopic present with the hope that something will one day change.”

Born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, Robert Longo was deeply influenced by social and political issues from an early age. He graduated high school in 1970, weeks after the Ohio National Guard massacred several students at Kent State University who were protesting the US invasion of Cambodia—including one of Longo’s former classmates, whose body was shown in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph that shocked the world. In 1973, Robert Longo enrolled at Buffalo State College, where he trained as a sculptor and began his decades-long friendship with fellow artist Cindy Sherman. The two moved to New York together in 1977, and, throughout the 1980s, Robert Longo frequently performed in New York rock clubs in Menthol Wars, his band with Richard Prince. During this period, he also designed album covers for numerous bands and directed music videos for New Order and R.E.M.

In his first solo exhibition at Metro Pictures in New York in 1981, Robert Longo showed his charcoal and graphite Men in the Cities drawings, works that became icons of the “Pictures Generation.” This group, which includes Robert Longo, Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, and David Salle, is known for critiquing the anaesthetizing power of consumer capitalism and the indoctrinating effects of mass media through their art. Working with diverse materials at increasingly ambitious scales over the course of his career, Robert Longo cemented himself as a preeminent artist of his generation. Today, his work can be found in the collections of major museums around the world, including The Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Brooklyn Museum in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; Tate in London; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; and many other international institutions.

PACE NEW YORK

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Related Posts:

Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History

Milwaukee Art Museum, October 25, 2024 – February 23, 2025

Robert Longo

The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna, September 4, 2024 – January 26, 2025

Robert Longo: Searchers 

Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac, London , October 9 – November 9, 2024 

Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History @ Milwaukee Art Museum

Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History

Milwaukee Art Museum

October 25, 2024 – February 23, 2025

The Milwaukee Art Museum presents Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History, an exhibition that features nearly 40 monumental drawings, sculptures, and videos created by the artist over the past decade. The presentation emphasizes Longo’s hyperrealistic charcoal drawings.

“Robert Longo’s work is visually compelling in its exceptional detail and powerful in its reflection of his view of contemporary culture. In this age of constant immersion of images from advertisements to news footage, Longo’s drawings break through the visual deluge in captivating ways,” said Marcelle Polednik, PhD, Donna and Donald Baumgartner Director. “We look forward to engaging our audiences with his most recent body of work, a long-overdue and distinct opportunity.”

Born in 1953 in Brooklyn, Robert Longo has long examined how media images affect people. Rising to prominence in the 1980s as a leading figure of the Pictures Generation alongside Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, Longo continues to explore the effects of our image-saturated culture. Through his practice, he engages with how people filter, retain, and process the incredible number of images we consume on a routine basis. Today, Robert Longo is widely known for his ambitiously scaled charcoal drawings that reflect on the construction of symbols of power and authority, including images of animals and nature as well as global conflicts and protest movements.

Though based on images from various media sources, Longo’s meticulous drawings are not exact transcriptions. Instead, he combines elements from multiple images with art historical archetypes and compositional elements in an effort to create what the artist considers “a perfect image.” Longo’s drawings result in a new understanding of the source images, one which reflects his views on the subject matter’s significance and urgency. Furthermore, through their monumental scale and technical precision, the images he depicts invite viewers to pause and spend time reflecting on the subject matter.

“Robert Longo’s ability to capture both the essence and experience of an image through his monumental charcoal drawings is unparalleled,” said Margaret Andera, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art. “His subject matter can range from the profound, to the inspiring, to the tragic, and the works resonate with a power that comes from the combination of Longo’s thorough consideration of the image and his meticulous technique.”

The Acceleration of History is the first solo presentation of Longo’s work in the Midwest in more than three decades. It presents this audience with a unique opportunity to engage with Longo’s more recent work and reflect on his response to the compelling issues of our time, such as the divisive U.S. political climate, war, and environmental crises. The exhibition prominently features Longo’s series The Destroyer Cycle, which he began in 2014, along with works from other series including Hungry Ghosts and Gang of Cosmos. Highlights from the exhibition include:

- Untitled (American Eagle 2017), 2017, depicts the sharp profile and soft feathers of a bald eagle, an emblem of the United States; 

- Untitled (Kenny Britt, St. Louis Rams; Hands Up), 2016, depicts a single St. Louis Rams football player standing with his hands raised and head slightly bowed in the “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture. The drawing captures the player’s stance of protest and highlights the intersection of sports and social justice following the 2014 police shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, MO, and subsequent protests;

- Untitled (State of the Union, Washington DC, USA, February 5, 2019), 2019, depicts former President Trump’s second State of the Union address at which many congresswomen wore white, referencing the suffragette movement. Longo draws particular attention to the more than 100 women serving in the House of Representatives of the 116th Congress;

- Untitled (Iceberg for Greta Thunberg), 2020, illustrates a tremendous wall of ice above the ocean’s surface. Serving as commentary by Longo on climate change, the drawing is based on photographs he captured during his travels to Newfoundland, Canada, where he witnessed entire sheets of ice breaking off glaciers and falling into the ocean;

- Untitled (Nascar Crash, Daytona), 2021, captures the chaotic and violent nature of a racecar crash, emphasizing the dramatic energy of the sport and serving as an allegory for society’s media consumption; and

- Untitled (The Three Graces; Donetsk, Ukraine; March 14, 2022), 2022, portrays a wedding storefront display of gowns in Donetsk, Ukraine, damaged by bullets from Russian forces. The drawing captures the stark contrast between the delicate beauty of the gowns and the harsh violence of the conflict.

Along with the monumental drawings are Longo’s large-scale, spherical installation Death Star; The Year of 2018. Created in 2022, this captivating work is composed of 40,000 .308 caliber bullets, aluminum, steel l-beams, and chains, measuring 21 feet in diameter. The number of bullets corresponds to the number of gun-related deaths in the U.S. in 2017. The sculpture serves as a commentary by the artist on gun violence and the pervasive threat of mass shootings in contemporary society—a recurring theme in Longo’s work. The Acceleration of History also includes two of Longo’s videos and two additional sculptures.

The exhibition continues the Museum’s longstanding relationship with the contemporary artist. Its collection is home to two lithographs by Robert Longo: Men in the Cities, Joanna (1983) and Men in the Cities, Larry (1983). One month before the exhibition opens, on September 21, the Museum recognized Robert Longo as the 2024 honoree at the Art:Forward Gala, an annual benefit that supports the Museum’s contemporary art program.

In addition to the Milwaukee Art Museum, Longo’s work has been exhibited around the world and is included in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art, New York; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Centre Pompidou, Paris; and Tate, London; among others. Beyond his drawings and sculpture, Robert Longo has directed music videos like R.E.M.’s “The One I Love” (1987) and movies such as Johnny Mnemonic (1995) with Keanu Reeves. During the exhibition’s run, the Museum and Milwaukee Film will partner to screen Johnny Mnemonic: In Black and White at the Oriental Theatre on November 21, at which Robert Longo will be present and participate in a post-screening discussion.

Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History was curated by Margaret Andera, Senior Curator of Contemporary Art at the Milwaukee Art Museum. 

A catalogue with essays written by Margaret Andera, journalist Tom Teicholz, and artist Rashid Johnson accompanies the exhibition.

MILWAUKEE ART MUSEUM

700 N. Art Museum Dr., Milwaukee, WI 53202

mam.org

Robert Longo @ Pace and Ropac, London - "Seachers" Exhibition

Robert Longo: Searchers 

Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac, London 

October 9 – November 9, 2024 

ROBERT LONGO

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. 

PACE GALLERY LONDON

5 Hanover Square, London W1S 1HQ 

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Robert Longo @ Albertina Museum, Vienna

Robert Longo

The ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna

September 4, 2024 – January 26, 2025

 

As an artist, I feel a moral imperative to preserve

the images of our shared dystopic present

with the hope that something will one day change. -- Robert Longo [1]

The ALBERTINA has a special connection to Robert Longo: “It was around 20 years ago that we were able to reopen the Albertina in 2003 with Robert Longo's exhibition ‘The Freud Drawings’. In my last year as General Director of the Albertina, we are looking back on these beginnings and dedicating a comprehensive retrospective to the outstanding American artist. The repositioning of the Graphic Art Collection began with Robert Longo. Instead of continuing to collect conventionally in cassette format and seeing the drawing primarily as a sketch or study that prepares the actual work of art, since this Longo exhibition in 2003 we have for the first time made the development of contemporary art towards the monumental, drawn ‘picture’ the guiding principle of a contemporary collection and museum mission: Franz Gertsch, Anselm Kiefer and many others, who had previously been ignored by the Albertina because of their large-format works, defined our new self-image from this point onwards”, says ALBERTINA General Director Klaus Albrecht Schröder.

The show features important key works from the various periods of his production, beginning with Men in the Cities, the series that made him famous overnight and embodied the zeitgeist of early 1980s New York like few other works. The exhibition also presents the Bodyhammers, in which the artist expresses his unease with gun culture in the United States, as well as works from the Freud cycle. The latter is based on photographs secretly taken in Freud’s office and apartment for documentation purposes, before he had to flee from the Nazis to London in 1938. Also featured are works from God Machines, in which Robert Longo addresses monotheistic world religions, and The Destroyer Cycle, in which he takes up events from global politics.

Robert Longo: Monuments in black and white

Robert Longo is known for his monumental hyperrealistic works: powerful, dynamic charcoal drawings whose virtuoso technique and the visual force of the motifs mesmerize the observer. For his models, Robert Longo uses photographs that record dramatic situations at the moment of their greatest tension. The artist is concerned here with the depiction of power—in nature, politics, history. He utilizes visual material that has been reproduced thousands of times, and which has long been a part of pop culture, of our collective visual memory. Longo isolates and reduces the motifs so as to raise their visual impact to a higher power. By enlarging the subject and intensifying the lighting into a dramatic chiaroscuro, we find ourselves before gigantic, previously unseen theatrical images. Longo draws on existing images, references reality secondhand, and creates impressive “copies” of the original black-and-white photographs, which pale beside their transformation into colossal charcoal drawings.

The dramatic lighting and shadow effects of the charcoal drawings emphasize the objects’ plasticity and the spatial depth. They make the motif appear as real as it is unreal. The deep black of the charcoal rubbed into the paper swallows up all of the light. Paradoxically, Robert Longo is ultimately capable, like no one else, of evoking brightness and radiant light, transparency, and differentiated materiality with the blackness of charcoal.

Robert Longo and the Pictures Generation

In the late 1970s Robert Longo belonged to the so-called Pictures Generation, a loose grouping of New York artists that critically engaged with mass media and pop culture in their works. His iconic large-scale series of drawings Men in the Cities (1979–83; pp. 31–39) in their extreme, dynamic poses aptly expressed the fragile mood— fraught with tension—of the 1980s. New York in those days was dominated as much by financial wealth, a real estate boom, and yuppie culture as it was by rising criminality, drug problems, and social inequality, polarizing the city. The neoconservative politics of the Reagan era and the threat posed by the Cold War contributed to a climate of insecurity. Longo’s severely formal drawings echo this sentiment. The figures are dressed in “urban uniforms and Film Noir attire” [2] against a white background, in an empty space, each one isolated, frozen in a moment of intense movement and physical contortion. The artist found a correspondence in the intensely stylized representation of black-and-white contrasts, originating in news media and black-and-white films. [3] Robert Longo prefers these abstract symbols to be installed as a group in order to create a rhythmic tension. He thereby also articulates their individually experienced inner turmoil in a collectively lived structure marked by tension and pressure.

The dramatics and the composition of an image play a central role in Longo’s work. For the God Machines (2008–11; pp. 110–15), his portrayal of places of worship, he creates an atmosphere of reverence and sublimity through overwhelming size, through light and shadow, as well as through the perspective that expresses the power of religious institutions. A detailed elaboration of a bullet hole in close-up (pp. 15, 102/103), which allows the observer to recognize every crack and every splitter in the glass, literally draws us into the violence of the moment. By precisely rendering the mushroom cloud (p. 87) in central perspective, the artist transmits not only the enormous power, brutality, and destructive force of the catastrophic event of an atom bomb exploding, but also the feeling of fascination in the face of the terrifying beauty of this phenomenon.

Longo’s visual universe is fueled by personal impressions, influences, and topics connected with U.S. society, politics, and pop culture, as well as significant global events. Police brutality and racism, war and terrorism, the exercise of power, repression, and violence all find expression in his works. Yet even if the motifs appear personal, the artist is not concerned alone with the expression of an individual emotion.

Robert Longo: Raft at Sea

It is one of Robert Longo’s most impressive and at the same time most poignant works: Untitled (Raft at Sea) (2016–17; pp. 12/13, 184/185) depicts a rubber dinghy on the high seas, overloaded with its cargo of refugees and dangerously low in the water. The people in it, mostly men, sit on the edge of the rubber ring, disturbingly close to the water’s surface. They wear caps, hats, and thick jackets under their life vests, indicating the inhospitable temperatures. The composition situates the boat on the horizon line in the upper third of the image, on the central panel of the monumental charcoal drawing. The entire area underneath is the dark sea with its turbulent waves, to which the dinghy and its passengers are exposed. An overcast sky stretches above, becoming less clouded over to the right—at least promising a little hope. We observe the scene not from a secure perspective from above, from a larger ship, or from the air, but on the same level as the rubber raft. We might, therefore, be in a similar dinghy or even in the water amid the waves. The artist has thus placed us in the same predicament as the people shown in his drawing, who are risking their lives to flee.

For Raft at Sea, Robert Longo draws on an image we have often seen in the media in recent years. Yet in the whirlwind of images that swirl around us every day, we no longer perceive the situation in all of its harrowing intensity, because we have, to a certain degree, become accustomed to it. Through the artist’s altered composition and the enormous size of the work, Longo forces us to look once more and to engage with what is presented.

In his charcoal drawings, he appropriates the pathos, aesthetics, and narrative of film, the visual language of the cinema. Drawing on his experience as a film director and his work on music videos for bands such as New Order and R.E.M., Robert Longo often brings a cinematic gaze to the creation of his works. His motifs recall film stills that capture a moment of tension, an emotional climax. This dramatic component is experienced anew every time we see a work, as if it is happening right now, thereby acquiring a timeless quality. 

[1] Robert Longo in conversation with the author on June 27, 2024.

[2] The information and the following quotations are from a conversation between the artist and the author on February 22, 2024.

[3] In addition to film and television, Robert Longo was also influenced by the energy of the downtown punk and New Wave music scene. See the essay by Holger Liebs in this publication: Jerking into Now. Robert Longo’s Men in the Cities and the “Pictures Generation,” 23.

Curator: ELSY LAHNER 

Assitant: MELISSA LUMBROSO 

ALBERTINA MUSEUM

Albertinaplatz 1, 1010 Vienna

www.albertina.at

Updated Post - 09-07-2025