Robert Longo b. 1953

Robert Longo is an American painter and sculptor. As a child growing up in Brooklyn, he loved TV, comic books and magazines, later using pop culture as an influence in his artistic career. Longo studied at the University of Northern Texas and then finished his studies with a concentration in sculpture from SUNY Buffalo.

In the 1980s, he joined a group of artists in New York that examined issues of masculinity, power and mass media. Longo became famous for his Men in the Cities series, which shows men and women in suits in contorted positions. He also examines power and authority through a series of oversized hand guns and blackened American flags entitled Bodyhammers, Freud Drawings and The Sickness of Reason featuring atomic bomb blasts. Longo has been an influential figure in New York for thirty years and has exhibited his works at impressive shows as the Whitney Biennial in New York, documenta in Kassel and the Venice Biennale.

Robert Longo has work featured in the permanent collections of the Albertina in Vienna, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Eli Broad Family Foundation in Los Angeles, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the High Museum in Atlanta, the Jewish Museum in New York, the Jüdisches Museum in Berlin, the Lannan Foundation in Los Angeles, the LACMA, the Ludwig-Forum fur Internationale Kunst in Aachen, the Menil Collection in

 Houston, the Montreal MFA, the Musée d'Art Contemporain in Montreal,the Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain in Nice, the MoMA in New York, the Saatchi Collection in London, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam, the Tate Gallery in London, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and the Whitney Museum of American Art in New York.

Related Categories: The Pictures Generation, Photorealistic, Black-and-white Photography, Popular Culture, Figurative Painting, Work on Paper, Drawing, Symbolic Composition, United States, Staged Photography, Cultural Commentary, Performance Art, Film/Video, Engagement with Mass Media, Sculpture, Photography, Painting, Unsettling, City Life, Landscape, Industry, Waterscape.