Robert Longo, Charcoal : Retrospective. Catalogue of the Exhibition at the Kunsthalle Weishaupt, 2010/2011

ISBN-13: 9783775731966 / Angielski / Twarda / 2012 / 252 str.

Hal Foster; Robert Longo

Opis

Robert Longo's mastery of charcoal drawing has made him one of America's most admired artists. With every new work he reinvests the tradition of history painting with fresh relevance and impact, rendering majestic, era-defining images in a sensuous and sculptural photorealism. Longo's sense of both literal scale and historical scope is monumental, as a survey of his numerous serial works soon reveals: the Freud Drawings cycle of 2000 with its large-format treatment of Edmund Engelmann's photographs of Sigmund Freud's Vienna apartment, taken days before Freud's departure for London; or the 2003 Sickness of Reasonseries, with its high-contrast images of atomic explosions, combining sublimity and terror; or the famous one-drawing-per-day Magellan sequence of the mid-1990s, a virtual atlas of the iconography of the 1990s, intermixed with images from Longo's immediate daily life. This handsome, chunky volume surveys Longo's drawings of the past two decades, from Magellan and the Freud cycle to Monsters (2000), Sickness of Reason (2003), Ophelia (2002), Beginning of the World (2007) and others.
Robert Longo was born in Brooklyn in 1953 and received a BFA in sculpture from Buffalo State College in 1975. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Longo collaborated with musicians loosely associated with New York's No Wave movement, such as Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham and Jonathan Kane, and formed the band Robert Longo's Menthol Wars. In the 1980s, as his Men in the City drawing series was winning him critical acclaim, Longo also directed several music videos, including New Order's -Bizarre Love Triangle- and R.E.M.'s -The One I Love.- In 1995 he directed the cyberpunk film Johnny Mnemonic, starring Keanu Reeves, Dolph Lundgren and -Beat- Takeshi.

O autorze

The enormous, photorealistic charcoal drawings by American artist Robert Longo ( 1953 in Brooklyn, New York) show the beauty and horror of the present day and age. His large-format works contrast the innocence of sleeping toddlers, the tranquil grandiosity of Earth and the planets, roses in bloom, and Gothic cathedrals with threatening images of atom bomb explosions, fighter pilots, monster waves, sharks, and the muzzles of revolvers. Inexorably and seismographically precise, the winner of the 2005 Goslar Kaiserring and 2010 inductee into the French Order of Arts and Letters records the state of our world. Longo's powerful motifs give form and expression to the feelings of fear and longing felt by people in the twenty-first century, and affect the viewer with the full force of the medium.
This large-format, elaborately designed book, printed on natural paper using a tritone process, bound in half cloth and distributed in four different cover designs, has been created in close collaboration with the artist and affords a comprehensive overview of his charcoal drawings from the past decade.
Exhibition schedule: Kunsthalle Weishaupt, Ulm, November 28, 2010-September 25, 2011