Lot 464 R

"A Longo drawing has the impact of a drive-in movie image glimpsed from the highway, and it exerts this graphic force with unabashed ease. The success of Pop Art granted everyone permission to bring high and low art into direct contact. Mixing irony with their enthusiasm for ready-made images, the Pop artists held as tight to their high culture positions as Marcel Duchamp ever did. So does Longo. His ambitions align him with the most prestigious traditions of the New York School. Considered not as pictures but as objects, these drawings display the signs of "serious" post-war American art, all of them derived from the heritage of Jackson Pollock and his generation: large dimensions, indeterminate scale, the bluntness of a central image in place of composition's checks and balance" (Carter Ratcliff Robert Longo, Munich, 1985, p. 13).
The great white shark is counted among the central themes of Robert Longo's photo-realistic charcoal drawings, which he portrays in his series Perfect Gods. The American artist draws the iconic motif with a wide-open jaw and protruding sharp teeth in an overwhelming size. The symbol of terror, which became the archetype of animal cinematic monsters through its medial staging, advances in close proximity to his viewer in Shark 7. With its immense physical presence and plasticity, the work obtains an almost sculptural appeal as the artist, who has studied sculpture himself, remarks. Furthermore, the eminent depth effect manifests itself in the chiaroscuro lending suggestive expression to the ocean giant and demanding an immediate reaction from its recipients due to its grotesque directness.