The artist Robert Longo purports to a be a truth-teller for our times. He has become known for minutely detailed and dauntingly large drawings that contend with forms of brutality, both within the US and abroad. Barbarism, conflict, and protest; the war in Ukraine, Black Lives Matter, the Women’s March, Confederate monuments: it’s all there in his sprawling new show of drawings at Pace Gallery, a revised version of an exhibition last year at the Milwaukee Art Museum.
The drawings are for the most part based on images Longo sources from the media and then licenses for his own use. He has positioned his art as an honest portrayal of how power works. “I’m free of sponsorship or the government,” Longo told the artist Michelle Grabner earlier this year in an interview for the Brooklyn Rail.
The drawings, often rendered with such intricacy that they appear to be photographs, should be about as direct as art gets. Instead, they are glib and evasive.
Take Untitled (Ferguson Police, August 13, 2014), his 2014 depiction of cops in combat gear. These armored police are the ones who stared down Black Lives Matter protestors following the killing of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black man who was shot by a white officer. But those protesters are nowhere to be seen in this 10-foot-long picture, which cloaks the cops in the lush shadows one expects from a Georges de La Tour painting. (Those shadows are themselves magnified: they are in the original photograph from which Longo worked, but they are nowhere near as bold in that picture as they are in the artist’s drawing.) If Untitled (Ferguson Police, August 13, 2014) is a history painting for our times, it is an uncomfortably beautiful one that feels prettified and removed from the reality it seeks to represent.
Or consider Untitled (Refugees At Mediterranean Sea, Sub-Saharan Migrants, July 25, 2017), a 2018 drawing based on a widely circulated press photograph of a raft full of migrants cresting an enormous wave. Longo frequently edits the images he appropriates; he’s altered this one so that the swell occupies even more space. Pushing the migrants further toward the picture’s margins may generate Longo’s desired emotional response, but it’s also manipulative, and even worse, dishonest.
Compare it Michael Armitage’s Raft (ii), a 2024 painting that recently appeared at David Zwirner in New York and likewise features migrants drifting through the ocean. Where Armitage’s painting is underplayed and unresolved, with figures that melt away into the inky blue ether, Longo’s drawing is melodramatic and overstated. Like Armitage, Longo is mapping art historical ideas of the sublime onto an actual tragedy, but unlike Armitage, Longo makes the tactical error of overemphasizing his subject when no exaggeration is necessary to convey the horror of his source image. In fact, such exaggeration feels perverse.
Longo used to be a more thoughtful artist. He cut his teeth as one of the core members of the Pictures Generation artists, who, during the late 1970s and early 1980s, harvested images from art books, movie magazines, and newspapers and used them as raw material for their work. Longo always stuck out. His colleagues Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, and Louise Lawler made photo-based art that was steeped in disillusionment and French theory. Longo’s work, on the other hand, was warmer, weirder, and distinctly handmade. Having begun with sculptural pieces based on baddies from noir films and Westerns, Longo hit it big with “Men in the Cities,” a 1977–83 group of drawings showing people dressed in business formal who twist dramatically through white voids.
The “Men in the Cities” works remain electric because they contain a central ambiguity: it’s not clear if these yuppies are dancing or being shot. But that sort of ambiguity started to disappear from Longo’s work soon afterward, and now, it’s no longer present at all. In its place is a grinding literalism. (The name of his Pace show, “The Weight of Hope,” is itself thuddingly obvious.)
Whether it’s a 2023 work showing a drooping American flag or a 2021 work showing the stars and stripes being flown in the streets of Minneapolis during a George Floyd protest, the works tell Longo’s intended audience what it already knows: something is rotten in the state of America. If you are interested in what is rotten and why it’s rotten—and all the nuance that goes along with that—you’d best look elsewhere.
And yet, Longo would be far better off sticking with his literalism than in creating metaphors. Pace, and presumably Longo, felt it was necessary to add a wall label next to Untitled (Daytona Crash), a 2025 drawing showing two race cars colliding, telling us that “NASCAR is a metaphor for the inexorable, indefatigable, and finely tuned American war machine.” Sure, fiery blazes, smashed-up car trunks, and flying tires illustrate the same violence that the military-industrial complex thrives upon. But as long as you are showing images of, for instance, the war in Ukraine, why not give us an actual representation of the American war machine—say, in the form of military aid provided to Israel, to which the US sent $4 billion in weapons earlier this year?
Wall texts accompany most of the Longo artworks in the Pace show, but, notably, not one where a text would actually be useful: his drawing of a painting by Goya. In the Brooklyn Rail interview, Longo described redrawing Goya’s Third of May 1808, a painting that depicts a Spanish man being executed for resisting Napoleon, and said that he turned to it in an “attempt to deal with images from Gaza in a way that was not too volatile or graphic.” It’s hard to see that in the work itself, which looks like any other Pictures Generation artwork that involves copying someone else’s masterpiece as a statement about authorship.
Elsewhere at Pace, there’s a new film called Untitled (Image Storm, July 4, 2024–September 9, 2025), which features a flow of 10,000 pictures that speeds by so quickly, it’s impossible to get a good look at most of them. Periodically, the film comes to a screeching halt as a computer pauses on a single picture. During my visit, the computer lingered over a shot of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University pro-Palestine protest leader who was detained by ICE for 104 days, despite his status as a legal permanent resident of the US. What did the image mean in this context? Why did film stop there? Was it significant?
But then Longo’s film started up again, bombarding me with more images before I could contemplate those questions, much less have a chance to form even one coherent thought. If editing images together in such quick succession that they appeared to strobe incomprehensibly is a metaphor for the rapid-fire nature of our present media environment, it’s a tired one. I felt a certain amount of relief leaving the Pace show. At last, I’d seen it all.
