Robert Longo

While creating work for his exhibition at Pace Tokyo, Longo was inspired by Paul Klee’s watercolor monoprint Angelus Novus (1920), in which a curious angel is poised to either take flight or surrender. The piece was once owned by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who referred to the angel in his 1940 essay “On the Concept of History” as a witness to the future, an “angel of history,” whose “face is turned toward the past […] But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future."

Longo’s investigations into allegorical mythologies and ancient archetypes that span cultures incorporate an array of loaded icons: a crashing wave, a submerged whale, a blooming peony. The centerpiece of his presentation across the gallery’s two floors is Untitled (American Samurai), a drawing of the Japanese baseball player, the superstar of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Shohei Ohtani. For the artist, Ohtani’s legacy as one of the best players of a quintessentially American pastime speaks powerfully to the collision of the two cultures.

Highlights also include new drawings of subjects from the natural world—including an arresting portrait of a tiger baring its teeth, an image of a cresting wave inspired by Hokusai, a misty mountain range, and blooming flowers—and iconic American figures from the 20th century: John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy Onassis, as well as Elvis Presley.

Born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, Longo was deeply influenced by social and political issues from an early age. He graduated high school in 1970, weeks after the Ohio National Guard massacred several students at Kent State University who were protesting the US invasion of Cambodia—including one of Longo’s former classmates, whose body was shown in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph that shocked the world. In 1973, Longo enrolled at Buffalo State College, where he trained as a sculptor and began his decades-long friendship with fellow artist Cindy Sherman. The two moved to New York together in 1977, and, throughout the 1980s, Longo frequently performed in New York rock clubs in Menthol Wars, his band with Richard Prince. During this period, he also designed album covers for numerous bands and directed music videos for New Order and R.E.M.

In his first solo exhibition at Metro Pictures in New York in 1981, Longo showed his charcoal and graphite Men in the Cities drawings, works that became icons of the “Pictures Generation.” This group, which includes Longo, Sherman, Prince, Louise Lawler, and David Salle, is known for critiquing the anaesthetizing power of consumer capitalism and the indoctrinating effects of mass media through their art. Working with diverse materials at increasingly ambitious scales over the course of his career, Longo cemented himself as a preeminent artist of his generation. Today, his work can be found in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Brooklyn Museum in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; the Albertina Museum in Vienna; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the Tate in London; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; and many other international institutions.