Robert Longo’s Epic Vision Still Shapes How We See the World

“Epic.” That’s the word Robert Longo reaches for when asked to describe his massive charcoal drawings. Words never came easily to him, Longo told me. As a child with dyslexia, he relied on images: films like The Ten Commandments or Spartacus; publications like Life Magazine and National Geographic. “Movies, television, magazines: I learned to read pictures. I understand pictures.”

That instinct—to treat images as language—defined a career that spans nearly every corner of visual culture. Longo emerged in the late 1970s as a leading figure in the Pictures Generation alongside David Salle and his ex-girlfriend-turned-lifelong-friend Cindy Sherman. His breakthrough series (of “epic” charcoal drawings) “Men in the Cities,” made between 1977 and 1983, became an emblem of postmodern anxiety. He has directed a Hollywood feature, made music videos for R.E.M. and New Order, and mounted museum and gallery exhibitions at the most important venues worldwide. Today, he’s considered one of the most influential artists of his generation, a figure who moves restlessly between media, making bold statements about the current moment all the while.

I met Longo on the top floor of a 19th-century brick building in SoHo, a multi-room studio he’s occupied since 1984 (once a shared apartment with late video artist Gretchen Bender). The space is massive and worn-in, and it nods to the touchstones of Longo’s life. Just inside the door hang posters for two “epic ” films: Paul Schrader’s Mishima and Longo’s own cyberpunk caper Johnny Mnemonic. Above his sink, there’s a framed T-shirt printed with Lynda Benglis’s 1974 Artforum ad.

In the main room hang the three monumental charcoal drawings that he was working on: two dueling jets (one American, one Russian) and a half-finished close-up of a Formula 1 crash. “A car crash is a real beauty,” Longo said, his signature all-black outfit dusted with charcoal and his hands covered in dark smudges like a mechanic’s.

Spectacle has always been Longo’s subject as much as his medium. At 72, he is reflecting on his career even as he pushes forward. In the last year, he mounted two retrospectives: one at the Albertina Museum in Vienna (which traveled to the Louisiana Museum in Denmark), another at the Milwaukee Art Museum, “The Acceleration of History.” Now, he’s presenting one of his most ambitious gallery shows yet. This month, Pace Gallery devotes its entire West 25th Street flagship to his recent work in “The Weight of Hope,” spanning four floors and filling the space with 26 large drawings, three films, three sculptures, and 33 charcoal drawings on paper. The gallery’s façade will be covered with a vinyl of the First Amendment.

Longo has always made political art, fueled by his belief that art has social power. In 1985, Longo told the New York Times: “I think my art is going to change the world.” When I asked him about this, he responded: “I got so much shit from that, but it was like, ‘why not?’”

This brash confidence has driven Longo throughout his career. When he directed Johnny Mnemonic in 1995, a cyberpunk thriller written by sci-fi legend William Gibson, Longo wanted Keanu Reeves to play the main part. When Reeves’s publicist refused to connect them, Longo told me, “A friend of mine threw [the script] over the fence to Keanu’s house, and he read it.” Similarly, Longo wanted to shoot the film in black and white, but the studio refused. Decades later, he painstakingly recut every scene to match his original plan. He wanted to leak it online until friends warned him off, but in 2022, his preferred version was finally released. Without fail, Longo stayed true to his vision.

The film’s dystopian story—a world ravaged by a tech-induced plague and ruled by corporations—remains a mirror of his worldview. “I grew up with the idea that technology will save us,” he said. Now, he sees its influence more as a force that keeps us hooked in a constant doomscroll.

Longo channels the daily barrage of images into his drawings, which frame pictures we would usually encounter on social media, making us feel their weight rather than scroll past their impact. Or as he put it: “The fact is that we, as artists, have the chance to tell the truth…So in that sense, I’m trying to make a show that is politically charged.” In his eyes, his job as an artist is much like a journalist’s: to report and platform what’s happening in the world.

At the same time, what he is reaching for, he told me, is something harder to pin down: “hope,” as the title of his new show suggests. His drawings from the past couple of decades focus on scenes where beauty and violence collide, from warzones to natural disasters, all rendered in greyscale with meticulous detail.

“The world is really fucked up right now,” he said, “but I have to believe I have some hope…I read this quote by Saint Augustine, where he said hope has two daughters. One is rage, which I obviously have a lot of. The other one is courage. So, you have to be pissed off at the way things are, and you have to have the courage to change them. If that’s what hope is, I’ve got a lot of it.”

In the Pace show, much of this rage takes form in the selection of large-scale charcoal works that he refers to as the “world on fire.” These charcoal drawings are based on documentary images that confront political and environmental collapse. One of his haunting charcoal drawings, Untitled (The Three Graces; Donetsk, Ukraine; March 14, 2022) (2022), originated from a news photograph of three dresses in the shattered window of a shop in Donbas, Ukraine.

“It was the mother, the bride, and the bridesmaid,” explained Longo. “These clowns went by with heavy machine guns and blasted the fucking glass…This drawing was made out of such rage at the stupidity of these people.”

In the ground floor gallery, the namesake triptych The Weight of Hope (War, Religion, Nature) (2025) anchors the entire show. The work comprises three monumental 8-by-12-foot drawings: a soldier manning a howitzer in Ukraine; a mass of pilgrims circling the mosque in Mecca, seen from above; and firefighters struggling to contain a 2024 blaze in Gorman, California. Each of the panels reflects on a significant theme that dominates international politics and conversations.

On the seventh floor, Longo turns to video, featuring three films that play in succession. One, Icarus Rising (2019), shows Longo tearing up photographs culled from mainstream media, from war refugees escaping on boats to Black Lives Matter protestors in Minneapolis. “There’s a slow motion of ripping apart all the source images, but the sound is like the Earth shaking,” he said, as he played me a section of the video.