Video Room: Robert Longo: Icarus Rising

Robert Longo was born in 1953 in New York, where he still lives and works. After studying art at the State University College in Buffalo, New York, Longo returned to New York City in 1977. That year, he was among the five artists included in the seminal Artists Space show, "Pictures", the first exhibition to contextualize a young group of artists, subsequently named the Pictures Generation, who were turning away from Minimalism and Conceptualism towards image-making inspired by newspapers, advertisements, film, and television.  Longo has had one-person exhibitions at the Menil Collection, Houston (1988); Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago (1989); Los Angeles County Museum of Art (1990); Deichtorhallen, Hamburg  (1991); Isetan Museum of Art, Tokyo (1995); Albertina, Vienna (2002); Kunstmuseen Krefeld, Germany (2002); the Musée d'art moderne et d'art contemporain, Nice (2009); Museu Berardo, Lisbon, Portugal (2010); and the Sara Hildén Art Museum Tampere, Finland (2017). In 2016, the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow, presented a major exhibition of his works alongside those of Francisco Goya and Sergei Eisenstein. The exhibition, titled Proof, traveled to the Brooklyn Museum in 2017 and to the Deichtorhallen Hamburg in 2018. Most recently, solo exhibitions have been held at Kunstmuseum Schloss Derneburg (2020) and at the Palm Springs Art Museum (2021-22). In September 2024, a major exhibition of Longo's work will open at the Albertina Museum in Vienna, Austria. Longo has been included in Documenta 7 and 8, the 1983 and 2004 Whitney Biennials, and the 47th Venice Biennale in 1997. In 2005, Longo received the prestigious Kaiserring award in Germany for "outstanding achievements in modern art." His work can be found in numerous museum collections around the world.