Robert Longo : The Acceleration of History

Longo’s latest charcoal drawings of dissent reflect American media’s preoccupation with violence

Once a part of the Pictures Generation and still making art today, Robert Longo (born 1953) creates large, hyperrealistic drawings rendered in charcoal, giving his compositions a black-and-white photographic effect. He has depicted everything from swimmers to fighter jets and from cathedrals to suits of armor. This survey of Longo’s last 10 years of work centers on The Destroyer Cycle, a series he began after the 2014 Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri. Distilling scenes of power and violence across recent American history, Longo’s glimpses range from the hyperlocal (streets in Memphis and Washington, DC) to the universal (a line of riot cops, a bullet hole in a glass window). These arresting images, eerily similar to photographs, underscore the journalistic angles adopted by US media when depicting social unrest.