ROBERT LONGO

Drawing inspiration from news photography and footage from the past year, these new works see Longo rendering poignant scenes of a country in crisis. The eerie and deeply compelling pieces in this timely exhibition centre around events and collective experiences related to the political climate of 2020 and the devastation precipitated by the Coronavirus pandemic.

For the first time in seven years, Longo is presenting his large-scale charcoal drawings without the frames’ glazing, providing viewers with a more immediate and intimate experience of each mark. As a response to the installation’s lack of reflections, the artist has made the entire exhibition visible via a highly reflective stainless-steel polyhedron sculpture entitled Dürer’s Solid (2021), which, positioned in the middle of the gallery space, acts as the exhibition’s omniscient eye. A nod to the enigmatic, seemingly anachronistic forms represented in Albrecht Dürer’s engraving Melencolia I (1514), the collision of images reflected back to the viewer offers boundless readings of the surrounding works. Viewed from various positions in the space, the different facets of the sculpture fuse together discordant images, composing an improbable whole.

Longo’s development of the exhibition began with two images: an expanse of seats in an empty stadium, Untitled (Baseball Stadium) (2020), and a frenzied mass of bats, Untitled (The Cauldron) (2021). In making the former, the artist’s labour-intensive process of drawing each seat one by one became an act of filling up a space that individuals could not occupy. The graphic nature of the image situates it in the liminal space between representation and abstraction, which Longo has explored throughout his career.

Longo’s rendering of a swarm of bats in Untitled (The Cauldron) refers not only to the possible origin of the Coronavirus but also to the exhibition’s title, taken from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: ‘On the bat’s back I do fly / After summer merrily./ Merrily, merrily shall I live now / Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.’ The artist has long been inspired by the visual effects of Shakespeare’s language. This particular quotation and its optimistic underpinnings resonated with him as the U.S. emerged from the pandemic with a new president.

Anchoring the exhibition is Longo’s Untitled Untitled (Robert E. Lee Monument Graffiti for George Floyd; Richmond, Virginia, 2020) (2021), which depicts the graffiti-covered surface of the only remaining Confederate statue on Richmond, Virginia’s Monument Avenue. In recent years, Longo’s works tracing the removals of Confederate statues have served as vehicles for the artist’s hope that America is beginning to grapple meaningfully with its iniquitous history. The deliberately cropped and flattened composition provides an intimate view of the range of power in each mark, from a boldly spray-painted gesture to sentiments written more subtly in Sharpie. A can of spray paint in the right of the composition signals Longo’s invitation for the audience to join the conversation.

The artist juxtaposes this scene with the performative expressions and gestures depicted in his drawing—titled Untitled (Insurrection at the U.S. Capitol; January 6th, 2021; Based on a photograph by Mark Peterson) (2021). A foregrounded figure stands with the confidence of a classical Greek statue as he is recorded on an iPhone. Draped in an American flag cape, he postures as a cinematic superhero.

In conjunction with its reflection on ongoing struggles for justice and equity in America, the exhibition will support the Equal Justice Initiative, a Montgomery, Alabama–based nonprofit working to end mass incarceration and abolish the death penalty. Another presentation of Longo’s work will follow I do fly / After summer merrily on the seventh floor of Pace’s gallery in New York in November of this year. I do fly / After summer merrily will coincide with Longo’s solo exhibitions at the Palm Springs Art Museum, California, which is presented in collaboration with Jeffrey Deitch and Metro Pictures and runs from July 1 to February 6, 2022, and at the Guild Hall, Center for the Visual and Performing Arts in East Hampton, New York, which will be on view from August 7 to October 17, 2021. In fall 2024, the artist will open a retrospective at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria.

Robert Longo was born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, and now lives and works in New York, New York. 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 additionally has had one-person exhibitions at the Musée d’art moderne et d’art contemporain, Nice; Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany; Albertina, Vienna; Isetan Museum of Art, Tokyo; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; and the Menil Collection, Houston. He has been included in Documenta 7 and 8, the 1983 and 2004 Whitney Biennials, and the 47^th Venice Biennale.