Robert Longo

Robert Longo is one of the defining artists of the Pictures Generation and among the most technically commanding draftsmen working today. His Men in the Cities series (1979 to 1983), with its sharply dressed figures caught mid-convulsion, became one of the signature images of 1980s New York and remains the body of work collectors reach for first.

Born in Brooklyn in 1953 and raised on Long Island, Longo earned his BFA from SUNY Buffalo in 1975. Two years later he was one of five artists in Douglas Crimp's landmark Pictures exhibition at Artists Space, alongside Sherrie Levine and Jack Goldstein, the show that gave the Pictures Generation its name.

Working mostly in charcoal and often at monumental scale, Longo renders photographic source images (crashing waves, bullets in flight, atomic blasts, crowds in protest) with a precision that reads as photography from across the room. Later bodies of work include the Monsters wave drawings, The Freud Cycle, The Destroyer Cycle and A History of the Present, his ongoing response to the pandemic and political upheaval of recent years.

His work is held in more than 60 public collections, including The Museum of Modern Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Centre Pompidou. The Albertina in Vienna mounted a major retrospective in 2024 to 2025, which then traveled to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark.