Images against the flood of images

Robert Longo (*1953) always sees creative processes as a political act. Artists are reporters who are committed to the truth and current problems. The most important aspect of his creative process is the selection of the motif, as Longo emphasizes, not the painting of his own work. He therefore sees himself as a conceptual artist. His works are created after meticulous preparatory work, sometimes with the help of assistants, but it often takes up to a year to complete one of his monumental charcoal drawings. With his hyper-realistic black and white drawings, he highlights particularly intense and dramatic images from the flood of images of our present day and works against the rapid forgetting of significant events in modern reporting. Longo uses the choice of color to isolate the image statements and potentiate their effect. Images that have appeared thousands of times in the media and are perceived as familiar and therefore less shocking or important – and have become »unsuitable for the news« – are given back their original pictorial power by Longo. From April 11 to August 31, his works can be seen in the exhibition of the same name at the Louisiana Museum of Art in Humblebæk, Denmark.

Longo made his breakthrough in the 1980s with his Men in the Cities series. Prior to this, he had also worked with installation, performance and video art during his studies as a result of a contact with his fellow student Cindy Sherman. Longo has been considered an important artist for decades. He has taken part in the most important art exhibitions – the documenta, the Venice Biennale and the Whitney Biennial – and has received many important prizes, including the Kaiserring of the city of Goslar in 2005. Longo has also experimented with other media, directing several music videos and the cyberpunk feature film Johnny Mnemonic (1995).