Robert Longo solo show at Louisiana, Denmark The first comprehensive display of the artist's work in Scandinavia . (This link opens in a new tab).
Black on white. Charcoal on paper. Snapshots, carved out of time. Robert Longo captures motifs from the whirlwind of images that surround us and then enlarges and constructs them, layer upon layer, into dramatic and gigantic charcoal drawings. The results are epic in format and scale and captivate us with an almost hypnotic force.
Stop, look again, reflect, feel. American artist Robert Longo is widely renowned for his huge, hyperrealistic drawings in black and white. The motifs are often intense and dramatic 'shots' from the tumultuous and chaotic image storm of our time, which he first captures and crops, then unfolds in a truly monumental scale.
Longo's painstaking and slow transformation of these snapshots into giant charcoal drawings - the process for a single work can take up to a year - holds an enormous power of fascination. The results are both impressive and alluring while at the same time standing out as a powerful wake-up call from an artist who seeks to reclaim and maintain the individual image's ability to 'bear witness'.
— Robert Longo
The exhibition at Louisiana is the first comprehensive display of Longo's work in Scandinavia. It brings together a number of key images from his entire career and also includes the series of studies for the famous 'The Freud Cycle', based on photographs of Sigmund Freud's office and apartment in Vienna, taken just after the Nazis came to power in 1938. On view as well will be one of Longo's latest pictures, which is based on a photo of bullet holes after the terrorist attack at Krudttønden in Copenhagen, 2015.
