We never just look at one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are. — John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972
Robert Longo re-envisages his Combines of the 1980s in Searchers, a two-part exhibition presented at Thaddaeus Ropac and Pace in London. His monumental new multimedia works reflect the breadth of the American artist’s career-long experimentation with the visual potential of different media. Conceived as a pair, Untitled (Pilgrim) will be presented concurrently with a second new Combine, Untitled (Hunter), on view at Pace, and coincides with Longo’s major solo exhibitions at the ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna and Milwaukee Art Museum.
Watch the artist discussing the two-part exhibition
Untitled (Pilgrim), 2024. Mixed media, 5 parts. 223.5 x 750 x 15.2 cm (87.99 x 295.28 x 6 in)
With the new Combines Longo explores the idea of the artist as a ‘searcher’ as he actively seeks out images from the world around him. Informed by Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage and art critic John Berger’s foundational text Ways of Seeing (1972), he juxtaposes art-historical images with film stills, advertisements, videos of elemental forces and journalistic photographs of natural and human catastrophes to examine how meaning is made and disseminated in contemporary society. Returning to the format after four decades, Longo offers a re-reading of John Berger in the context of our digital age, particularly the impact of social media on our strategies of interpretation, with each panel of the new works evoking the proportions of a mobile phone screen, recalling the sensation of endless scrolling through social media.
Longo made the first body of works he refers to as Combines between 1982 and 1989, a mixture of relief, photography, drawing, silkscreen, sculpture and painting named after Robert Rauschenberg’s earlier pioneering Combines (1954–64). After debuting his celebrated series of drawings Men in the Cities (1979–83) at Metro Pictures in 1981, Longo devised the Combine format to extend his investigation into the multiple meanings that might emerge from different images, media and technologies. Just as the Men in the Cities drawings were not intended to be seen as isolated images but rather ‘in sequences,’ the Combines assembled drawings and paintings with sculptural elements made from wood, metal and plexiglass in what the artist conceptualises as a ‘collision’ or montage, giving rise to new meanings.
I deliberately want these Combines to refuse to become coherent narratives. What you see in these five images in front of you is one picture, and you’re putting that together in your head. — Robert Longo
A charcoal drawing of Gian Lorenzo Bernini’s marble sculpture the Ecstasy of Saint Teresa (1647–52) is cropped tightly to the mystic’s face, highlighting her enigmatic expression of exquisite pain and ecstasy. The ambiguity of expression recalls the contorted poses of the suited figures of his Men in the Cities, captured either dancing or dying.
Untitled (Pilgrim), 2024 (detail)
Charcoal on mounted paper
223.5 x 139.7 x 15.2 cm (88 x 55 x 6 in)
Untitled (Pilgrim), 2024 (details)
Video monitor and steel frame, 3D color print, and patinated cast resin
Each panel: 223.5 x 139.7 x 15.2 cm (88 x 55 x 6 in)
Next to Saint Teresa, a video of fire is set behind a frame of steel bars, imprisoning the symbol of passion. Conceived as an homage to a steel work by multidisciplinary American artist Gretchen Bender, which revealed a video through a small slit, Longo cultivates the dual status of fire as both beautiful and destructive, as well as its alchemical potential to ‘transform matter from one kind to another.’
At the centre of Untitled (Pilgrim), Longo presents an image of an opulent diamond necklace lifted from a Chanel advertisement that he encountered on the wrapper of an issue of The New York Times. Struck by the proximity of the mechanisms of capitalist desire to the contemporary consumption of news, the artist was compelled to use the image in his own work. Printing it on enamelled aluminium, ‘so it would feel like a painting,’ he materialises the alluring quality of the advert within the Combine. Echoing the way in which we encounter information and images in the contemporary world, with these works, Longo poses a challenge to us, the viewer, our strategies of interpretation and our relationship to digital media today.
In turn, a panel of densely tangled, horizontal bronze tree branches, cast from branches taken from the artist’s own garden, is reminiscent of the stylistic mode of Abstract Expressionism.
This is followed by a photographic image of an iceberg taken from the internet, which acts as a counterpoint to the video of fire. A stripe down the centre of the image marks a former waterline, rendered visible when the iceberg turned in the water. Evoking Longo’s drawings of icebergs, which recur as a key motif in his artmaking, the photograph asserts his conviction in the power of images as consciousness-raising tools, here, highlighting the devastating effects of climate change.
Untitled (Pilgrim), 2024 (detail)
Dye Sublimation print
223.5 x 139.7 x 15.2 cm (88 x 55 x 6 in)
Just like waves and bombs, flowers are the moment of their being. Every time you look at these flowers, they’re blooming. I want my work to happen every time you look at it. — Robert Longo
Searchers also presents two works on paper that demonstrate Longo’s hyper-realistic drawing practice, including a depiction of wisteria in full bloom on a monumental scale; ‘I think of flowers as at once feminine yet masculine; sweet yet venomous; explosive yet temporal events.’
Untitled (Wisteria), 2024
Charcoal on mounted paper
224.2 x 177.8 cm (70 x 88.25 in)
— Robert Longo
A black-and-white, ultra-fast-paced, looped film presents the onslaught of the ‘image storm’ of international news from 4 July 2024 through to the opening day of this exhibition. The film is presented on two scales across the galleries – as big as the space allows at Pace and the size of a smartphone at Thaddaeus Ropac.
Randomly interrupted by computer-generated stops, there is no beginning and no end, only different ways of looking and seeing. Through this exhibition, the artist poses a challenge to us, the viewers, our strategies of interpretation and our relationship to digital media today.
Untitled (Image Storm, July 4 - October 8, 2024; Chapter One), 2024
Black and white film. Duration: 1 hour loop
Edition of 4 + 1 AP
Untitled (Hunter), 2024. Mixed media, 5 parts. 223.5 x 750 x 15.2 cm (87.99 x 295.28 x 6 in)
The five-panel work at Pace, Untitled (Hunter) (2024), is composed of the following, from left to right: a film still of Keanu Reeves from the movie John Wick, a hyper-violent film about vengeance; a cascading sculptural relief made up of dense vertical strips of black and red plexiglass with dangerous, irregular and highly reflective edges; a painting using 3D printing of cut-and-pasted protest images; a video of a sparkling blue-black current installed behind a steel frame with seven horizontal openings receding in perspective; and a charcoal drawing based on a grainy telephoto image of refugees at the Belarus-Polish border, appearing like a ring from Dante’s Inferno.
Untitled (Hunter), 2024 (detail)
Dye Sublimation print
223.5 x 139.7 x 15.2 cm (88 x 55 x 6 in)
Untitled (Hunter), 2024 (details)
Plexiglass, 3D color, and video monitor and steel frame
Each panel: 223.5 x 139.7 x 15.2 cm (88 x 55 x 6 in)
Untitled (Hunter), 2024 (detail)
Charcoal on mounted paper
223.5 x 139.7 x 15.2 cm (88 x 55 x 6 in)
