Connecticut HQ Art

The "Men in the Cities" photographs were originally used as source material for Robert Longo’s iconic pencil drawings, "Men in the Cities" (1979-1987), a series that was exhibited and reproduced extensively in the 1980s. This series depicted archetypical figures twisting, convulsing, and appearing to fall in front of city skylines. The visually assaulting photographs of elegant men and women dressed in corporate attire were influenced by media images as well as iconic films. On the rooftop of his New York studio, Longo photographed friends and models—including Cindy Sherman and Larry Gagosian—in contorted positions, capturing their poses as they reacted to the rubber balls and rocks that were thrown at them. Portraying the body against a white background devoid of context, his drawings depicted the figure without a ground. Three decades later, the photographs were printed and shown as artworks in their own right and have become influential to a generation of younger photographers.

Longo was one of five artists included in the seminal 1977 Artists Space show Pictures, the first exhibition to contextualize a young group of artists, subsequently named the Pictures Generation, who were turning away from minimalism and conceptualism toward image-making inspired by newspapers, advertisements, film, and television.

The artist has exhibited widely, with one-person exhibitions at the Menil Collection (Houston, Texas), Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Deichtorhallen Hamburg, Isetan Museum of Art (Tokyo), Albertina (Vienna), Kunstmuseen Krefeld (Germany), the Musée d’art moderne et d’art contemporain (Nice), and Museu Coleção Berardo (Lisbon, Portugal). Most recently, a retrospective of his work was presented at the Sara Hildén Art Museum (Finland). 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, traveled to the Brooklyn Museum in 2017 and to the Deichtorhallen Hamburg in 2018. Longo has also been included in Documenta 7 and 8, the 2017 Whitney Biennial, and the Venice Biennale. His work can be found in many museum collections around the world. He attended the State University College in Buffalo, New York.