ROBERT LONGO

The five drawings contemplate the crimes upon which America was built while also serving as records of various ongoing crises in the US. Detailed renderings of a Native American headdress; a field of cotton; a tattered flag; a pile of opioid pills; and the wing of a fallen bird are uniformly sized and installed in close succession. The order of the images indicates a chronology, and each work activates the next to gain a perpetual momentum akin to that found among the five spheres of a Newton Pendulum.

Untitled (American Sinscape) is, in part, a tribute to James Rosenquist’s monumental painting F-111 (1964–65), which comprises fragmented images representing and denouncing American militarism. At 30 feet long, Longo’s new installation encourages viewers to meditate on American history. While the works examine the country’s past, they also allude to urgent social and political issues that persist today.

The sculpture is a bronze casting of a stack of newspapers the artist collected each day for one year during the pandemic: a fitting memorial to a tragic, bizarre, and disruptive year. The project began in March 2020 as the pandemic precipitated widespread shutdowns in the US. The stack of newspapers next to Longo’s desk became a visual representation of the shared and overwhelming experience of living through a year of civil unrest, global mourning, and crushing uncertainty. Towering over the viewer’s head at nearly ten-feet-tall, the bronze structure embodies a similar precariousness. In making the work, Longo was inspired by the illusion of endlessness in Constantin Brancusi’s The Endless Column (1937), a 98-feet-tall memorial to the fallen Romanian soldiers of World War I. While Brancusi’s monolith stretches well beyond reach, there is indeed an end in sight.

Longo is currently the subject of a solo exhibition—presented in collaboration with Pace Gallery, Metro Pictures, and Jeffrey Deitch—at the Palm Springs Art Museum, California, on view through March 27, 2022. In fall 2024, the artist will open a retrospective at the Albertina Museum, Vienna.

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, travelled 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.