Robert Longo

Metro Pictures, New York
Acquired from the above by the present owner in 2007

New York, Metro Pictures, Robert Longo: The Outward and Visible Signs of an Inward and Invisible Grace, 2006

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition. There is some wear in isolated places along the edges of the frame. There is a nick to the extreme lower left cornertip of the frame.
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Robert Longo’s best work inspires a sense of the sublime. In consideration of his drawings, we encounter crashing waves, plumes of nuclear explosions, and the wrinkled noses of snarling tigers; we stare into the opaque visors of fighter pilot helmets and peer down the barrels of cocked pistols. His photorealistic exactitude eschews pastoral pleasantry; the viewer is made to feel small, vulnerable, and powerless to resist the immutable forces of the subjects on display. In the artist’s own words: “I always imagine that I want to make art that is going to kill you... A great deal of my work is a meditation on power. But the thing about power is that you can’t play with it without understanding its consequences. Ultimately, it’s about not closing your eyes to power but actually being able to enjoy it” (Robert Longo in conversation with Maurice Berger: ‘The Dynamics of Power: An Interview with Robert Longo’, Arts Magazine, New York 1985, Vol. 89, pp. 88-89).

In Untitled (Earth, for Zander), this awe-inspiring sense of the sublime is evoked through a contemplation of galactic vastness. Longo shows earth as seen from space, reducing our entire planet to a spherical abstraction of swirling weather patterns, and condensing the past, present, and future of humanity, into minute scale. Beneath an asinine web of spectral cloud, the silhouette of America emerges, with the East Coast and Longo’s native New York shown as nothing more than a faint outline. The work was first shown in 2006, at the Metro Pictures Gallery in Manhattan, alongside similar images of the sun as an explosive inferno, the moon as a ghost-like enigma half covered in darkness, and the stars as an infinite web of speckled light.

Longo first rose to prominence in the 1980s with his seminal Men in the Cities series. As part of the Pictures Generation including artists such Cindy Sherman and Barbara Kruger, Longo’s conceptually-driven investigation of the relationship between photography and drawing explores the seductive power of images and their relation to mass media. In his drawings, Longo uses an assortment of charcoals ranging in density and tone to realise the contrast, and various types of erasers to manipulate and sculpt the drawing’s surface. Initially trained as a sculptor, Longo embraced drawing as an attempt to do “something that wasn’t mainstream… There was painting and sculpture and then there was drawing… They always seemed to be these intimate things, so the idea of elevating drawing to painting seems to be radical. I wanted the works to operate on a really grand scale. It was important to compete with what was going on in the world, in the media, and in the art world” (Robert Longo quoted in: ‘Working Towards Affection: An Interview With Robert Longo’, Border Crossings, no. 115, September 2010, pp. 40-41).

With an impressive sense of gravitas, the present work fully demonstrates the artist’s meticulous draughtsmanship as he exploits the tonality of charcoal to imbue the work with an intense chiaroscuro, emphasising the contrast between the sparse, yet glistening light and the deep, expansive black. Untitled (Earth, for Zander) is an exceptional example of Longo’s oeuvre, offering us an idiosyncratic mood of the sublime through presenting the viewer with a view of themselves, as seen from a point of awe-inspiring cosmic infinity.