Robert Longo at the Hall Art Foundation The Hall Art Foundation is exhibiting Robert Longo's 'Icarus Rising' (2019)
The Hall Art Foundation is launching a rotating program of video works with the exhibition of Robert Longo’s Icarus Rising (2019).
Since the 1980s, Robert Longo has created work across media including drawing, photography, painting, sculpture, music, performance, and film. Using a vast vocabulary of source images culled from the mainstream media, as well as from historical and art historical references, Longo’s work strikes a balance between the very personal and the socially charged. For Longo, art is a political act and represents a way to understand and to question the world around us.
In the black-and-white film, Icarus Rising (2019), the action of Longo tearing up photographs culled from the recent mainstream media is slowed down and amplified, creating an immersive experience. The video’s imposing scale, sound and speed force the viewer to fully consume and consider images that have been dominating the contemporary American news cycle.
Robert Longo was born in 1953 in New York, where he still lives and works. After studying art at the State University College in Buffalo, New York, Longo returned to New York City in 1977. That year, he was among the five artists included in the seminal Artists Space show, Pictures, the first exhibition to contextualise a young group of artists, subsequently named the Pictures Generation, who were turning away from Minimalism and Conceptualism towards image-making inspired by newspapers, advertisements, film, and television. Longo has had one-person exhibitions at the Menil Collection, Houston (1988); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1989); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1990); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg (1991); Isetan Museum of Art, Tokyo (1995); Albertina, Vienna (2002); Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany (2002); the Musée d'art moderne et d'art contemporain, Nice (2009); Museu Berardo, Lisbon, Portugal (2010); and the Sara Hildén Art Museum Tampere, Finland (2017). In 2016, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, presented a major exhibition of his works alongside those of Francisco Goya and Sergei Eisenstein. The exhibition, titled Proof, travelled to the Brooklyn Museum in 2017 and to the Deichtorhallen Hamburg in 2018. Most recently, solo exhibitions have been held at Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg (2020) and at the Palm Springs Art Museum (2021–22). In September 2024, a major exhibition of Longo’s work will open at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria. Longo has been included in Documenta 7 and 8, the 1983 and 2004 Whitney Biennials, and the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997. In 2005, Longo received the prestigious Kaiserring award in Germany for 'outstanding achievements in modern art.' His work can be found in numerous museum collections around the world.
