Artist: Robert Longo

Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac present Searchers, a two-part exhibition of new work by Robert Longo, on view from October 9 at both Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac’s London galleries.

Each presentation will include a new Combine—monumental, five-panel multimedia wall works that return to the artist’s 1981-89 series of the same name—in addition to a large-scale charcoal drawing, a small graphite drawing, and a film. By rupturing and reassembling the symbols of a collective cultural mythology, these works advance Longo’s long-standing investigation into the relationship between the individual to society.

Robert Longo is widely recognized for his ambitiously scaled, hyperrealistic charcoal drawings. These monochromatic works often depict images from art historical sources, as well as scenes of protest, civil unrest, violence, war, and other social and political events. A key figure in the Pictures Generation of the 1970s and 1980s, his critical relationship to the media culture of his formative years has only intensified amid ever-more sophisticated methods of image distribution and an increasingly tumultuous global climate. Sourcing from television, film, news photography, personal photographs, and the internet, Longo carefully selects, alters, and enlarges these images, freezing their immediacy through the deliberate, time-intensive process of drawing. In doing so, he prompts viewers to reconsider their roles as consumers within today's image-saturated landscape.

Informed by Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage and John Berger’s influential text Ways of Seeing (1972), Searchers grew out of Longo’s desire for his charcoal drawings to be and do more. For the exhibitions at Pace and Thaddaeus Ropac, he has revisited his Combines, which he envisions as a tool in which to overcome the visual and conceptual limitations of two-dimensional images. Referring to Robert Rauschenberg’s earlier series of the same name, these large-scale, three-dimensional works bring together a range of materials (such as paint, stone, plaster, cast bronze, glass) and media (such as sculpture, drawing, film, photography) in a single work. The disparate parts are arranged in the way that Longo believes we encounter the world: as a bombardment of images and information that pervade our environment and consciousness.

The five-panel work at Pace, Untitled (Hunter) (2024), is composed of the following, from left to right: a film still of Keanu Reeves from the movie John Wick, a hyper-violent film about vengeance; a cascading sculptural relief made up of dense vertical strips of black and red plexiglass with dangerous, irregular, and highly reflective edges; a painting using 3D printing of cut-and-pasted protest images; a video of a sparkling blue-black current installed behind a steel frame with seven horizontal openings receding in perspective; and a charcoal drawing based on a grainy telephoto image of refugees at the Belarus-Polish border, appearing like a ring from Dante's Inferno.

Internally, Longo’s Combines resist simple resolution. Each constituent image of Untitled (Hunter) captures a moment of acute, visually violent motion. Their formal symbolism, suspended like a staccato edit in a film, undergoes a further stage of translation as they are entwined with their respective mediums. By applying scale and sequential structure to these familiar yet incompatible images, Longo challenges the viewer to interpret the work and, by extension, the expansive array of images that surround us. In this endeavor, Longo echoes Canadian philosopher Marshall McLuhan’s theory that ‘the medium is the message,’ highlighting how these images are mediated shapes our understanding and response to them.

Accompanying the Combine at Pace will be Untitled (Black Peony) (2024), a large-scale charcoal drawing. Longo describes flowers as “at once feminine yet masculine; sweet yet venomous; explosive yet temporal events.” Another drawing, Untitled (After Navalny) (2024), based on a photograph of a protest following the unlawful imprisonment and subsequent death of Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny, will also be included in the exhibition. Measuring 6 x 8 1/8 inches (15.2 x 20.6 cm), this work once again transforms scale to challenge the viewer’s process of meaning-making. The final element of the exhibition is a black-and-white, ultra-fast-paced, looped film presenting the onslaught of the image storm from one day of international news: July 4, 2024. The rapid flood of images is interrupted randomly by computer-generated stops, creating an experience with no beginning and no end, only different ways of looking and seeing.

Concurrent with his exhibitions in London, Longo is the subject of a major retrospective at the ALBERTINA Museum in Vienna, on view through January 26, 2025. At the Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin, the artist is presenting work from the last ten years within the broader scope of his career and in comparison to other art historical genres such as history painting. This exhibition, titled The Acceleration of History, will be on view from October 25, 2024, through February 23, 2025.