Robert Longo’s historic “Magellan” from 1996, of which eighteen pieces are presented in the exhibition, comprises 366 drawings (one per day for an entire year), each the size of a television screen. The series is dominated by content from the ‘here and now’. Motifs from films, advertising and other media prevail, along with images of rock stars and concerts, sports heroes, the artist’s family, politicians, news events, animals and landscapes. In short, they are depictions of Longo’s personal and cultural habitat. These unrelated drawings, a number of which hint at photographs, are not placed in any particular hierarchical order. Such random consideration conceivably reflects the absurdity of modern day media bombardment. With adept technical skill, the artist, perhaps intentionally, gives many of these drawings the suggestion of photocopied documents or black and white television images, it is almost as if he has left his black and white television switched on for a day or two. The universe to which we are transported, in this case, is the external world perceived through the iconography conveyed by mass media. Might we be observing a nineties version of Beeple’s digital work NFT “Everydays: the First 5,000 Days” ?
ROBERT LONGO
ABOUT
BIOGRAPHY
Robert Longo was born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, and now lives and works in New York, New York. Recent solo Exhibition include: Pace Gallery, New York (2021); Palm Springs Art Museum, California (2021); Jeffrey Deitch, Los Angeles (2020); Metro Pictures, New York (2019-1997); Hall Art Foundation, Schloss Derneburg Museum, Germany (2019); Cahiers d’Art, Paris (2016); The Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2013). Recent Group Exhibition include: British Museum, London (2020); Helmut Newton Foundation, Berlin (2019); Musée national Picasso, Paris (2018); MAC - Musée d’art contemporain de Montréal (2017). Collections include: Centre Pompidou, Paris; Fondazione Prada, Milan, Italy; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; Fundação de Serralves - Museu de Arte Contemporânea, Porto, Portugal; Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Netherlands; Tate, London; Whitney Museum of American Art, New York; National Gallery of Australia, Canberra.
