HUMLEBÆK.- A new exhibition at Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark presents American artist Robert Longo (b. 1953). Longo engages with mass-media images of the world, often responding directly to crises and current events. With few exceptions, Robert Longo’s works are monumental charcoal drawings on white paper, depicting the world’s hotspots.


Witness the Power of Longo's Charcoal Up Close: Inspired by the exhibition? Click here to explore a collection of books about Robert Longo on Amazon and delve into the monumental scale and intricate detail of his drawings. Experience the impact of his art from the comfort of your home.


“We live in this image storm, and I am trying to slow things down. All these images that we see for a split second, they are gone.” -- Robert Longo, in I’m a Caveman, Louisiana Channel, 2024

Robert Longo’s work is based on the artistic treatment of photographic reference. Over hundreds of hours of painstaking work, Longo and his assistants transpose press snapshots into charcoal on paper – student protests at an American university during the Gaza crisis, the 2022 killing of a young Iranian woman and the 2015 terrorist attack at Copenhagen’s Krudttønden cultural centre. Longo manages pulling media and pop-culture imagery from the media stream. Across the exhibition, we encounter ‘black holes’, dark places in the works where he takes out the moment, enabling us to really see them anew.

A majority of the works in the exhibition have been shown at a recent exhibition the Albertina Museum in Vienna. At the Louisiana, more historical depth has been added as this will be the first major presentation of Robert Longo in Scandinavia – including 53 works, created between 1978 and 2024, on loan from museums and major private collections in Europe and the US. At the Louisiana, the addition includes Longo’s 15 studies for the so-called ‘Freud Cycle’. The series is based on photographs taken in Freud's apartment and clinic in Vienna in 1938, a few days before his escape from the Nazis to London.

Contemporary history painting

Longo’s breakthrough series, Men in the Cities (1979-1983), depicting women and men in dramatically contorted poses, is an early example of the artist responding to key historical moments. The images are based on German director Rainer Werner Fassbinder’s film The American Soldier (1970), about a Vietnam veteran. Longo's generation came of age in the aftermath of Vietnam and Watergate, and the ensuing loss of cohesion in the story of America left a lasting mark on their art.

Overall, Longo’s work consistently examines topics such as social and racial tension and violence in American society. The country’s role in global crises is another recurring theme. Longo makes us realise that his images are works of art, constructions with a starting point in photography that have struck something in the artist. The violence, the injustices, the popular and political struggle.

In a number of works, Longo also goes further back in history, to Old Masters like Goya and Turner, converting their works to a smaller scale resembling magazine covers. Meanwhile, he blows up mass-media images of contemporary crises to the monumental scale of classical history paintings.

Isolated images

The Louisiana's exhibition of Robert Longo, who has long been represented in the collection with a work from his Men in the Cities series, continues the museum’s ongoing engagement with artists of his generation, including Cindy Sherman and Richard Prince. All three are members of what art historians have dubbed “The Picture Generation”.

The photographic representation of reality in isolated images was the material and critical focus of Longo and his peers. Not surprisingly, movies, mass-media images, drone shots, night-vision footage and x-rays are an optical throughline in this exhibition. In the 1990s, Longo found his true medium – charcoal – which he has used to manipulate and unpack his source material ever since.


Artdaily participates in the Amazon Associates Program, an affiliate advertising program designed to provide a means for us to earn commissions by linking to Amazon.com and affiliated sites. When you purchase through our links, we may earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. These commissions help us continue curating and sharing the art world’s latest news, stories, and resources with our readers.