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.
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