Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History

Robert Longo is widely known for his highly detailed and hyper-realistic charcoal drawings that explore the construction of power symbols. He explores the implications of living in an image-saturated culture—how we filter, process and preserve the images we are confronted with on a daily basis. This catalogue accompanies the exhibition Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History at the Milwaukee Art Museum and focuses on Longo’s works of the last ten years, including images of war, protest movements, immigration and climate change created in direct response to contemporary global events and drawn from images widely circulated through various media sources.

ROBERT LONGO (b. 1953) is an artist, filmmaker and musician living in New York. He is considered a key figure of the US “Pictures Generation,” which used appropriation and montage in the 1980s to unmask stereotypes in visual culture and to criticize the mediatization of war and the excessive glorification of history. With his labor-intensive, large-format charcoal drawings, Longo aims to slow down the consumption of the images that inundate us daily through our screens, or what the artist calls the “storm of images.”