Robert Longo’s black mirrors Review at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art
By Sadie Harper
It is a clear, blue summer’s afternoon in the sculpture garden of the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Humlebæk, Denmark – the kind that makes you understand why so many past visitors leap on to the commuter train back to Copenhagen, open up TripAdvisor, and gush about their visit to the planet’s most beautiful gallery.
[...]
If they have not visited the west wing before doing so, they have made a mistake. There, in a huge triptych by the Brooklyn-born artist Robert Longo, is another type of small boat – the kind used by migrants to reach Dover and for other dangerous journeys to places where they are told they are unwelcome and unwanted. Untitled (Raft at Sea) was created by Longo and his studio workers in 2016-2017, but to visitors from the UK, mindful of hotel protests and foaming rhetoric from Nigel Farage, it might feel like the picture of the summer.
Longo was in his mid-20s when he began taking his camera – and his friends – to his Manhattan rooftop. There, he threw small objects at them and photographed their sudden, jerking reactions. If you don’t know the backstory, it’s unclear whether these well-dressed New Yorkers are dancing, caught in some sort of ecstasy, or contorting as they are shot.
Longo turned the images into huge charcoal and graphite drawings of the figures on white backgrounds – his Men In Cities (1978–1983) series. This made him famous (more famous still when David Bowie took inspiration from it for his Lodger album cover). He went on to direct great music videos (New Order’s Bizarre Love Triangle, 1986) and not-great movies (Keanu Reeves’s Johnny Mnemonic, 1995), while continuing to make charcoal and graphite images of American flags and guns. Some critics detected diminishing returns – one from the New York Times even dubbed him “Robert Long-Ago”.
Since the turn of the millennium, Longo has been making work that is darker in every sense. These are huge, hyperrealistic pieces that showcase his mastery of chiaroscuro, the contrast between light and shade.
