Robert Longo

Pace Gallery is pleased to present Lazarus Manifold, an exhibition of recent work by Robert Longo, on the seventh floor of 540 West 25th Street in New York. Running from November 5 to December 18, the presentation follows Longo’s debut solo show at Pace, I do fly / After summer merrily, which was on view in New York this fall. Lazarus Manifold will feature Untitled (American Sinscape), a suite of five large-scale charcoal drawings, and the cast bronze sculpture Untitled (A Column of Time: One Year of The New York Times, March 2020–March 2021).

Untitled (American Sinscape) is, in part, a tribute to James Rosenquist’s monumental painting F-111 (1964–65), which comprises fragmented images representing and denouncing American militarism. At 30 feet long, Longo’s new installation encourages viewers to meditate on American history. While the works examine the country’s past, they also allude to urgent social and political issues that persist today.

The sculpture is a bronze casting of a stack of newspapers the artist collected each day for one year during the pandemic: a fitting memorial to a tragic, bizarre, and disruptive year. The project began in March 2020 as the pandemic precipitated widespread shutdowns in the US. The stack of newspapers next to Longo’s desk became a visual representation of the shared and overwhelming experience of living through a year of civil unrest, global mourning, and crushing uncertainty. Towering over the viewer’s head at nearly ten-feet-tall, the bronze structure embodies a similar precariousness. In making the work, Longo was inspired by the illusion of endlessness in Constantin Brancusi’s The Endless Column (1937), a 98-feet-tall memorial to the fallen Romanian soldiers of World War I. While Brancusi’s monolith stretches well beyond reach, there is indeed an end in sight.

Longo is currently the subject of a solo exhibition—presented in collaboration with Pace Gallery, Metro Pictures, and Jeffrey Deitch—at the Palm Springs Art Museum, California, on view through March 27, 2022. In fall 2024, the artist will open a retrospective at the Albertina Museum, Vienna.