Where United States culture, media, greed, and violence meet, one finds the work of Robert Longo. Longo's ground breaking series, "Men In The Cities", draws its strength and inspiration from Longo's fascination with the works of many artists in many media, but particularly from Hollywood's stylization of violence. His figures are captured in mid-motion; one wonders whether they are dancing or dying. Their creation and popularity have come to represent the high-speed, high-pressure decade of the 1980's. Longo describes the subjects in this series as "...doomed souls. They're people who built the buildings that would eventually fall on them." He views his work as abstract symbols, "...more like Japanese calligraphy, or logos" . Longo works with assistants to create an image and, as an artist, focuses on the communication in his images rather than the craft of producing the image. Asked about his influences, he names the "New York Post," the films of Sam Peckinpah, modern artists such as Vito Acconci, Sol LeWitt, Robert Smithson, Edward Hopper, and Egon Schiele, and further, Greek and Roman sculpture. Longo was born in New York City's Brooklyn and lives and works on the East Coast. He has exhibited his thought-provoking drawings in New York, Texas, Milan, Munich, Naples, Amsterdam, Rotterdam, Paris and Tokyo, as well as many other United States galleries. |
