Stop, look again, reflect, feel. American artist Robert Longo is widely renowned for his huge, hyperrealistic drawings in black and white. The motifs are often intense and dramatic “shots” from the tumultuous and chaotic image storm of our time, which he first captures and crops, then unfolds in a truly monumental scale.

The sea of ​​images we all have to navigate on a daily basis has dulled our senses, Robert Longo believes, and thus our ability to digest and relate to reality and its terrifying intensity. He himself often tackles material that has been reproduced thousands of times and which therefore forms part of our collective visual memory.

By cropping and enlarging and his masterful sense of working with light and shadow effects – so-called chiaroscuro – Longo uplifts adn intensifies the visual look of the original photo to a completely different dramatic and emotional level. And at the same time, through the very time-consuming use of drawing as a medium, he manages to slow down the pace of the picture – yes, almost pausing it. In this way, he wishes to make us see correctly, to re-engage – and to feel empathy.

He actually considers himself a concept artist, whose primary task is to select motifs, which he experiments with and fine-tunes in a smaller format and a long series of preliminary studies. From here, he is helped by studio assistants with the time-consuming process needed to create the large formats. Even with helpers, a single Longo work can be a year in the making.

Robert Longo was born in 1953 in Brooklyn and raised on Long Island. He set out to study art history, but was then trained at the State University College at Buffalo as a sculptor. Here he was also introduced to the art of film-making and founded a lifelong friendship with Cindy Sherman. Together they moved to New York at the end of the 1970s and became part of the so-called “Pictures Generation” – which also includes names such as Richard Prince and David Salle and rose to fame for their strongly critical approach to consumer society and the increasing influence of the mass media.

In 1981, Longo exhibited the series ‘Men in the Cities’ – drawings of well-dressed business people frozen in distorted and ambiguous poses – are they dancing or being shot at? These images were his breakthrough, and they still stand as some of the most iconic of the decade. Since then, in his career – which also includes directing music videos and the cyperpunk movie ‘Johnny Mnemonic’ – he has revolved around archetypes and motifs that range from weapons, bombs and bullet holes over natural phenomena (waves, flowers, animals) to refugees, religion and terror.