NEW YORK, NY.- Marc Glimcher, CEO and President of Pace Gallery, announced today that the gallery will be welcoming Robert Longo to its roster. Pace will collaborate closely with Thaddaeus Ropac as Longo’s existing gallery in Europe. With Ropac, Pace looks forward to building upon the work Metro Pictures did with Longo over the course of their four-decade relationship.

Robert Longo is a classically trained artist with a daringly contemporary vision. Over the past 40 years, Longo has explored drawing, photography, painting, sculpture, performance, and film to make provocative critiques of the anesthetizing and seductive effects of capitalism, mediatized wars, and the cult of history in the United States. In his monumental drawings, Longo marries intense imagination and creative ambition with exacting attention to detail to powerful effect. Rendering images from news media and popular culture at large scales in charcoal on mounted paper, he has created a seminal visual archive of our time. His meticulously rendered drawings work to “slow down” the viewer’s consumption of what the artist refers to as the “image storm,” combatting the impatient consumption familiar to today and immortalizing otherwise ephemeral documentation of current events that require greater attention and permanent record. Longo’s engagement with the contemporary moment draws inspiration from artists as diverse as Francisco Goya, Édouard Manet, Vito Acconci, Joan Jonas, and Stanley Kubrick, and positions him among the leading artists working today.

Longo’s unmatched technical finesse gives his drawings the appearance of photographs when viewed from afar. Upon closer inspection, however, the labor-intensive mark-making becomes clear. A leading artist of the “Pictures Generation,” Longo first gained recognition in 1979 with his Men in the Cities series, depicting figures as Film Noir characters that writhe in mid-air, encapsulating the energy and angst of the No Wave and Reagan era. Longo’s subsequent work, from Combines, to burned and blackened flags to images of protests and sporting events, has continued to mine the American psyche. A filmmaker, photographer, and musician, Longo has directed iconic music videos such as New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle (1986) and cult films like Johnny Mnemonic (1995).

Longo’s first project with Pace will be an exhibition in September 2021 at 540 West 25th Street, the gallery’s flagship Chelsea space. The exhibition will be composed of new works made between 2020 and 2021. Longo will also be the subject of two institutional projects this summer with solo exhibitions at Palm Springs Art Museum, California, presented in collaboration with Jeffrey Deitch, July 1, 2021 – January 30, 2022, and at Guild Hall, Center for the Visual and Performing Arts in East Hampton, New York, August 7 – October, 17, 2021. In fall 2024, the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria will present a retrospective exhibition dedicated to Longo.

Marc Glimcher comments: “I have been a Robert Longo superfan since I started working at Pace in 1985. His ability to capture our generation’s worldview on paper, the way our bands captured it on vinyl, was and is unique. Robert speaks in the language of memory, marked down in velvet in sheets of charcoal and iconographically reconstituted in brilliant black and white. Longo’s work in film, drawing, and sculpture has never been more relevant and more pressing than it is today. Pace is honored to follow the incredible 40-year partnership Robert had with Helene Winer and Janelle Reiring. Metro Pictures’ contribution to our art world simply cannot be overstated.”

Robert Longo comments: “I am thrilled to be joining Pace Gallery, a truly American gallery with an epic history. The decision of where to go after showing with Metro Pictures for 40 years was a difficult one. After my initial meeting with Arne and Marc, I immediately felt comfortable. Marc’s enthusiasm and insight into my work is inspiring. I am greatly looking forward to participating in the ambitious vision and showing in the extraordinary spaces Pace has created. What I’m doing now is the strongest work I’ve done in my life and I bring its relevance to Pace. I feel a moral imperative to be an artist, especially at this time, and I am confident that Pace Gallery will support the scope of my practice. With Pace it feels like it’s going to be a whole new ballgame that I’ve been training for my entire life.”

Robert Longo was born in 1953 in Brooklyn and grew up in Long Island, New York. He graduated high school in 1970, weeks after the Ohio National Guard massacred several students at Kent State University who were protesting the U.S. invasion of Cambodia. One of those killed was a former classmate of Longo’s, and his body was shown in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph that was seen across the world. The event shocked Longo, triggering his interest in political activism and media imagery.




In 1972, Longo received a grant to study restoration and art history in Florence. While touring the museums of Europe, he realized he wanted to make, rather than restore art. In 1973, Longo enrolled at Buffalo State College, where he worked for artists Paul Sharits and Hollis Frampton, who introduced him to structuralist filmmaking. Along with Charles Clough, Longo also co-founded Hallwalls (1974–ongoing), an alternative non-profit art exhibition space where he organized shows and talks with artists such as John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Robert Irwin, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Serra.

At Buffalo State, Longo started a friendship—that still exists to this day—with Cindy Sherman, and in 1977 the two moved to New York together, where Longo began working as a studio assistant to Vito Acconci and Dennis Oppenheim. That year he was included in the exhibition Pictures at Artist’s Space, curated by Douglas Crimp, which showcased work by a group of five young artists who were engaged with the politics of image-making, drawing from advertisements, newspapers, film, and television. The “Pictures Generation,” as they became known, included artists such as Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, and David Salle, and drew from semiotics and poststructuralist theory to investigate the way meaning is made and circulated in modern society. Their work often critiqued the anaesthetizing power of consumer capitalism and the indoctrinating effects of mass media. At his first solo show at Metro Pictures in 1981, Longo presented his charcoal and graphite Men in the Cities drawings, which instantly became icons of the “Pictures Generation,” and some of the most recognizable artworks of the 1980s.

Longo performed in New York rock clubs with the band Menthol Wars with Richard Prince, throughout the 1980s. During that period, he also designed numerous album covers, including Glenn Branca’s The Ascension (1981) and The Replacements’ Tim (1985). In 1986, he directed his first music video for New Order’s chart-topping song Bizarre Love Triangle, and the following year directed The One I Love, a video for R.E.M.’s first hit single.

Longo began working with diverse materials at increasingly ambitious scales. His Combines series, first exhibited in 1983, incorporated materials such as paint, graphite, wood, plaster, cast bronze, and steel in works that were part-painting, part-sculptural reliefs. Using Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage to juxtapose conflicting imagery and forms, they touched on many of the themes of war, alienation, and consumption that have remained central to Longo’s practice. The Combines were followed in 1990 by Black Flags, a series of cast bronze American Flags taking the forms of wall-hanging structures frozen mid-wave, free-standing pennants as sharp as missiles, and enormous impenetrable walls, all pointed critiques of US imperialism.

In 1989, Longo escaped a recession and the Gulf War by moving to Paris, where he lived and worked for three years, eventually returning to begin his Bodyhammers series of large-scale charcoal and graphite drawings of guns, and to direct the cyberpunk film Johnny Mnemonic, based on William Gibson’s text, which starred Keanu Reeves. Following the film’s release in 1996—a leap year—he began Magellan, a series of 366 small drawings, completing one each day from daily media sources. Taken together, the eclectic images of murders, funerals, concerts, sporting events, cops, superheroes, animals, and plants are a kind of channel scroll through the American subconscious, which became the lexicon for work to come.

Beginning in 1999, Longo began making large-scale charcoal wave drawings, his Monsters series, followed by The Freud Cycle, depicting Sigmund Freud’s consultation room and apartment in Nazi-occupied Vienna. On the one hand, the stormy seas counterbalance the cool rationalism of psychoanalysis, while on the other, the pairing suggests inner tempests. In 2009, he completed a cycle of drawings of other absolutes—bombs, nebulae, roses, sleeping children, and sharks— that he called The Essentials, and which form a poetic creation myth. These images are what Longo considers “absolutes”, embodiments of the collective unconscious.

Longo’s engagement with metaphysics continued in The Mysteries, a body of work completed from 2009 to 2014. Each drawing depicts a scene of beauty and contradiction: light streaming through cathedral windows and a forest; the eyes of a woman in a niqab and the reflection of clouds on a pilot’s visor. In 2014, following Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri and the declaration of an ISIS caliphate, Longo began The Destroyer Cycle, a series of works that distill scenes of power and violence from American media. Riot police, migrant ships, and terrorist attacks form a searing portrait of a world locked in perpetual crisis.

For an exhibition at Metro Pictures in 2014, Longo presented a series of twelve charcoal drawings, entitled Gang of Cosmos, that functioned as black and white translations of well-known paintings by Abstract Expressionists, including Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Joan Mitchell, and Mark Rothko, thereby creating his own version of this wholly American artistic legacy.

Longo continues to work with characteristic scale, precision, and perceptiveness, achieving images that, while drawn from recent history, would be otherwise impossible to see with the human eye. Longo’s latest body of work, A History of the Present, which he began in 2020, is informed by the coronavirus pandemic, the nation’s political upheaval, and the world’s tenuous ecological future, fueled by the artist’s personal experiences. Through this group of large-scale charcoal drawings, Longo seeks to focus on the power of the viewer and the individual’s capacity to create change, a celebration of freedom of expression.