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Robert Longo
Robert Longo - Men in the Cities (Rick), 1984 artist-certified photograph unique

1992

$10,000
£7,622.97
€8,708.65
CA$14,071.41
A$15,412.56
CHF 8,114.71
MX$183,943.74
NOK 103,414.74
SEK 94,536.66
DKK 65,077.02

About the Item

Robert Longo, Men in the Cities (Rick) , 1984 - unique artist-certified photographic document, 1992 Vintage photographic print on Kodak paper, with unique artist inscription and certification on verso Unique artist-certified photographic document with extensive handwritten inscription and signature Elegantly framed in a museum quality wood frame and ready to hang This work is a photographic print on Kodak paper, with artist inscription and certification on verso This work is a photographic document of Robert Longo's iconic Men in the Cities series, depicting the work known as Rick. The verso bears an extensive handwritten inscription and certification by Longo, executed in black marker and signed and dated 1992. In his inscription, Longo identifies the depicted work as: Untitled, 1984, Men in the Cities Graphite, flashe, and charcoal on paper 50 x 38 inches He further notes that the image appeared on the cover of Artnews, October 1989, and certifies it is an original work. (For reference only is a jpeg of the cover of the October 1989 Artnews magazine, but the magazine itself is not included) This document was likely created to accompany the original artwork and later became separated from it - common with archival material from estates and major collections. As such, it survives as a rare, autonomous object: it is at once a Certificate, a rare, archival photograph and a conceptual artifact. The photograph is printed on Kodak paper and is professionally framed in a museum quality black wood frame with UV-protective glazing and a die-cut window on the reverse to reveal the full handwritten inscription and signature. Works from Men in the Cities are among the most recognizable images of 1980s American art. This piece offers a unique point of access to that history - not as a reproduction, but as an artist-authenticated document directly tied to the series and its critical reception. A wonderful art historical artifact from the 1980s, a period that is very much in vogue these days and subject of major critical, commercial and scholarly re-examination. Measurements: Framed: 16.25 inches (vertical) by 13.5 inches (horizontal) by 1.5 inches Photograph: 9 inches (vertical) x 6.5 inches (horizontal) More About Longo's Men in the Cities Series: Men in the Cities is Robert Longo’s defining, canonical series. This work is artist-written, artist-signed and references a specific known work featured on the cover of Artnews magazine, summarizing the entire decade of the 1980s • The series was inspired by film stills of people dying or being hit with force. • Longo photographed his friends in dramatic poses, sometimes throwing things at them to capture the flinching motion, and then used these photos to create the final drawings. • The works have been interpreted as a critique or metaphor for the success-driven "yuppie culture" of the 1980s. • The specific work in the image is titled Rick. ROBERT LONGO BIOGRAPHY: Robert Longo grew up on Long Island, New York. He graduated high school in 1970, weeks after the Ohio National Guard massacred several students at Kent State University who were protesting the United States invasion of Cambodia. One of those killed was a former classmate of Longo’s, and his body was shown in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph that was seen across the world. The event shocked Longo, triggering his interest in political activism and media imagery. In 1972, Longo received a grant to study restoration and art history in Florence, Italy. While touring the museums of Europe, he realized he wanted to make, rather than restore art. In 1973, Longo enrolled at State University of New York College at Buffalo, where he worked for artists Paul Sharits and Hollis Frampton, who introduced him to structuralist filmmaking. Along with Charles Clough, Longo co-founded Hallwalls (1974–ongoing), an alternative non-profit art exhibition space where he organized shows and talks with artists such as John Baldessari, Lynda Benglis, Robert Irwin, Joan Jonas, Bruce Nauman, and Richard Serra. At Buffalo State, Longo started a friendship—that still exists to this day—with Cindy Sherman, and in 1977 the two moved to New York together, where Longo began working as a studio assistant to Vito Acconci and Dennis Oppenheim. That year he was included in the exhibition Pictures at Artist’s Space, curated by Douglas Crimp, which showcased work by a group of five young artists who were engaged with the politics of image-making, drawing from advertisements, newspapers, film, and television. The “Pictures Generation,” as they became known, included artists such as Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, Louise Lawler, David Salle, and drew from semiotics and poststructuralist theory to investigate the way meaning is made and circulated in modern society. Their work often critiqued the anaesthetizing power of consumer capitalism and the indoctrinating effects of mass media. At his first solo exhibition at Metro Pictures in 1981, Longo presented his charcoal and graphite Men in the Cities drawings, which instantly became icons of the “Pictures Generation,” and some of the most recognizable artworks of the 1980s. Longo performed in New York rock clubs with the band Menthol Wars with Richard Prince, throughout the 1980s. During that period, he also designed numerous album covers, including Glenn Branca’s The Ascension (1981) and The Replacements’ Tim (1985). In 1986, he directed his first music video for New Order’s chart-topping song “Bizarre Love Triangle,” and the following year directed “The One I Love,” a video for R.E.M.’s first hit single. Longo began working with diverse materials at increasingly ambitious scales. His Combines series, first exhibited in 1983, incorporated materials such as paint, graphite, wood, plaster, cast bronze, and steel in works that were part-painting, part-sculptural reliefs. Using Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage to juxtapose conflicting imagery and forms, they touched on many of the themes of war, alienation, and consumption that have remained central to Longo’s practice. The Combines were followed in 1990 by Black Flags, a series of cast bronze American Flags taking the forms of wall-hanging structures frozen mid-wave, free-standing pennants as sharp as missiles, and enormous impenetrable walls, all pointed critiques of US imperialism. In 1989, Longo escaped a recession and the Gulf War by moving to Paris, where he lived and worked for three years, eventually returning to begin his Bodyhammers series of large-scale charcoal and graphite drawings of guns, and to direct the cyberpunk film Johnny Mnemonic (1995), based on William Gibson’s text, which starred Keanu Reeves and Dolph Lundgren. Following the film’s release, he began a series titled Magellan in 1996—a leap year—comprising 366 small drawings, based on images from daily media sources. Taken together, the eclectic images of murders, funerals, concerts, sporting events, cops, superheroes, animals, and plants are a kind of channel scroll through the American subconscious, which became the lexicon for work to come. Beginning in 1999, Longo began making large-scale charcoal wave drawings, his Monsters series, followed by The Freud Cycle, depicting Sigmund Freud’s consultation room and apartment in Nazi-occupied Vienna. On the one hand, the stormy seas counterbalance the cool rationalism of psychoanalysis, while on the other, the pairing suggests inner tempests. These images are what Longo considers “absolutes,” embodiments of the collective unconscious. In 2009, he completed a cycle of drawings of other absolutes—bombs, nebulae, roses, sleeping children, and sharks—that he called The Essentials, and which form a poetic creation myth. Longo’s engagement with metaphysics continued in The Mysteries, a body of work completed from 2009 to 2014. Each drawing depicts a scene of beauty and contradiction: light streaming through cathedral windows and a forest; the eyes of a woman in a niqab and the reflection of clouds on a pilot’s visor. In 2014, following Black Lives Matter protests in Ferguson, Missouri and the declaration of an ISIS caliphate, Longo began The Destroyer Cycle, a series of works that distill scenes of power and violence from American media. Riot police, migrant ships, and terrorist attacks form a searing portrait of a world locked in perpetual crisis. For an exhibition at Metro Pictures in 2014, Longo presented a series of twelve charcoal drawings, entitled Gang of Cosmos, that functioned as black and white translations of well-known paintings by Abstract Expressionists, including Willem de Kooning, Lee Krasner, Jackson Pollock, Ad Reinhardt, Joan Mitchell, and Mark Rothko, thereby creating his own version of this wholly American artistic legacy. Longo continues to work with characteristic scale, precision, and perceptiveness, achieving visually striking images of people, places, events, and animals. The artist slows things down through the venerable medium of charcoal, often capturing images that would not otherwise be possible to see with the human eye. Through his large-scale hyperrealistic charcoal drawings, Longo has cemented himself as a preeminent artist of his generation. Longo’s body of work, A History of the Present, which he began in 2020, is informed by the Coronavirus Pandemic, the nation’s political upheaval, our tenuous ecological future, fueled by the artist’s personal experiences. Through this group of large-scale charcoal drawings, Longo seeks to focus on the power of the viewer and the individual’s capacity to create change, a celebration of freedom of expression. Longo’s work is held in multiple public collections worldwide, including The Albertina Museum, Vienna; The Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, among many others. A landmark traveling retrospective, Robert Longo, was held at The Albertina Museum from September 2024 through January 2025, and is on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark, through August 31, 2025.
  • Creator:
    Robert Longo (1953, American)
  • Creation Year:
    1992
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 9 in (22.86 cm)Width: 6.5 in (16.51 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    New York, NY
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU1745217361152

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