Robert Longo

Until 26 January 2025

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THE ALBERTINA MUSEUM, VIENNA

Robert Longo (*1953, Brooklyn) 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, 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.

Robert Longo: Untitled (Protest for Mahsa Amini; Iranian Embassy, Brussels; September 23, 2022), 2024 — **Image Gallery** – 17 Images

Show Photos — **Image Gallery** – 17 Images

Robert Longo | Untitled (Face), 2001 | Siegfried and Jutta Weishaupt Collection | © Robert Longo / Bildrecht, Vienna 2024 | Photo: Robert Longo Studio

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, Longo is ultimately capable, like no one else, of evoking brightness and radiant light, transparency, and differentiated materiality with the blackness of charcoal.

On view from 4 September 2024 until 26 January 2025 at the ALBERTINA Museum in Vienna.

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EXHIBITION CATALOGUE

EUR 39,90

Accompanying the exhibition a 208 pages strong homonymous catalogue is published containing texts by Elsy Lahner, Holger Liebs and Cindy Sherman, as well as a conversation between Robert Longo and Isabelle Graw.

Editors: Elsy Lahner, Klaus Albrecht Schröder
Languages: German | English
Pages: 208

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