Overview
Thaddaeus Ropac presents a selection of works by American artist Robert Longo that focus on the iconic imagery and symbolism of Christian iconography. While Robert Longo has worked in a variety of media – including performance, photography, sculpture and painting – he is best known for his large-scale, hyper-realistic charcoal drawings. Over his career, Longo has built a diverse visual lexicon, often centred upon motifs that signify power, authority, and socio-political structures. Drawing on Carl Gustav Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious, Longo explores how our visually oversaturated world shapes the way we filter, retain and process the images that bombard us daily.
Thaddaeus Ropac presents a selection of works by American artist Robert Longo that focus on the iconic imagery and symbolism of Christian iconography. While Robert Longo has worked in a variety of media – including performance, photography, sculpture and painting – he is best known for his large-scale, hyper-realistic charcoal drawings. Over his career, Longo has built a diverse visual lexicon, often centred upon motifs that signify power, authority, and socio-political structures. Drawing on Carl Gustav Jung’s notion of the collective unconscious, Longo explores how our visually oversaturated world shapes the way we filter, retain and process the images that bombard us daily.
Religious themes have been a recurring element in Longo’s arsenal of pictures, serving as a lens through which he examines the structures and narratives that shape Western society. The six works on view revisit motifs taken from mass media as well as classic works of art history, including paintings by Rembrandt and Leonardo da Vinci, and span from intimate, postcard-sized to monumental works. The exaggerated proportions of the works – whether monumental or minuscule – seek to challenge the passive consumption of images by reasserting their physical and ideological power in a media-saturated culture. In Untitled (Vatican Bishops) from 2016, a work spanning over three and a half metres in length, Longo depicts a group of cardinals waiting for the announcement of the election of Pope Francis in 2013. Huddled together in a mass of embroidered fabric, their backs turned from the viewers, the cardinals project a sense of secrecy. Undertaking a forensic approach to examining his source image, Longo internalises the minutiae in graphite on paper in ‘a sincere attempt to slow down the image, to provoke the viewer to consume its full power.’ Longo transforms artefacts of the sacred and historically charged into resonant meditations on faith, representation, power and the sublime.
