Robert Longo

Robert Longo – Friendship with Cindy Sherman; Bruce Nauman as role model

Robert Longo was born in Brooklyn, New York on 7 January 1953. As a child, he loved contemporary pop culture, comics and cartoons - a passion that would have a lasting effect on his later development as an artist. His formal artistic training took place with the sculptor Leonda Finke and at the universities of Denton and New York, and he also completed a period of study at the Academy of Art in Florence. With a Bachelor of Arts under his belt, he began his journey as an artist for which he pursued different approaches, working as a painter, sculptor, performance artist and director. While still at Buffalo State College in New York, he came into contact with the photo artist Cindy Sherman and together with her and Charles Clough, they founded the independent gallery Hallwalls. He was part of the underground scene in New York in the 1970s and soon became one of its leading figures. Robert Longo’s great role model in these early years was Bruce Nauman. 

Painter and draughtsman of the human soul; photographs as canvas

Robert Longo had success as a sculptor, but this fame was largely built on his large format drawings executed in ink, charcoal and graphite. While still a young artist, he met Richard Serra at an artists’ meeting in Buffalo which he had organised himself, and they became friends. In the 1980s he produced a sensational project with his series Men in the Cities, for which he put good friends in a classy dressing room and asked them to express the strongest possible emotions with facial expressions and gestures. The result caused a stir in the artworld and earned Longo the reputation of understanding quite masterfully the artistic depiction of psychological states of mind. He demonstrated particular talent in his use of the chiaroscuro technique which evokes emotions through the skillful use of light-dark contrasts. Longo uses greatly enlarged photographs for his spectacular drawings to which he adds his own details, thus elevating them to a new dimension of reality. 

Inspiration through music; proximity to film

Robert Longo met the German actress Barbara Sukowa in Hamburg, they married in 1994, and together they founded the rock band Barbara Sukowa & The X-Patsys. Music generally played an important role for Robert Longo: In his paintings, he was inspired early on by different musicians and their works, cello concerts by Bach, études by Chopin, jazz sounds, and of course rock music, but also worked closely with film, directing Johnny Mnemonic in 1995, the film adaption of a story by William Gibson. As well as his work for the big screen, he also designed music videos. Robert Longo has received prizes and awards including the Kaiserring der Stadt Goslar in 2005.

Robert Longo lives and works today primarily in his hometown of New York.