Artist Robert Longo has built his reputation as a contemporary truth-teller through minutely detailed, monumentally sized drawings that tackle forms of brutality both in the United States and internationally. His sprawling new exhibition at Pace Gallery, a revised version of a show that appeared at the Milwaukee Art Museum last year, presents works addressing barbarism, conflict, and protest, covering topics from the war in Ukraine to Black Lives Matter, the Women's March, and Confederate monuments.
Longo creates his drawings primarily from media images that he sources and licenses for his own artistic use. He positions his art as providing honest portrayals of how power operates in society. "I'm free of sponsorship or the government," Longo told artist Michelle Grabner in a Brooklyn Rail interview earlier this year. The drawings, rendered with such intricate detail that they often appear photographic, should theoretically represent art at its most direct and uncompromising.
However, the works in the exhibition titled "The Weight of Hope" prove disappointingly glib and evasive rather than powerfully direct. Consider "Untitled (Ferguson Police, August 13, 2014)," his 2014 depiction of law enforcement officers in combat gear. These armored police are the same ones who confronted Black Lives Matter protesters following the killing of Michael Brown, an 18-year-old Black man shot by a white officer. Yet those protesters are completely absent from this 10-foot-long picture, which instead cloaks the officers in lush shadows reminiscent of a Georges de La Tour painting.
These shadows are themselves artificially magnified – while they appear in Longo's source photograph, they are nowhere near as dramatically bold in the original image as they become in his drawing. If "Untitled (Ferguson Police, August 13, 2014)" functions as a history painting for contemporary times, it becomes an uncomfortably beautiful work that feels prettified and distanced from the reality it purports to represent.
Similarly problematic is "Untitled (Refugees at Mediterranean Sea, Sub-Saharan Migrants, July 25, 2017)," a 2018 drawing based on a widely circulated press photograph showing a raft full of migrants cresting an enormous wave. Longo frequently edits his appropriated images, and he has altered this particular image so the swell occupies even more space, pushing the migrants further toward the picture's margins. While this manipulation may generate Longo's desired emotional response, it proves both manipulative and fundamentally dishonest.
A comparison with Michael Armitage's "Raft (ii)," a 2024 painting that recently appeared at David Zwirner in New York and similarly features migrants drifting through ocean waters, reveals the problems with Longo's approach. Where Armitage's painting remains underplayed and unresolved, with figures that melt away into inky blue ether, Longo's drawing becomes melodramatic and overstated. Both artists map art historical concepts of the sublime onto actual tragedy, but Longo makes the tactical error of overemphasizing his subject when no exaggeration is necessary to convey the horror of his source image.
Longo was once a more thoughtful and nuanced artist. He emerged as one of the core members of the Pictures Generation artists, who during the late 1970s and early 1980s harvested images from art books, movie magazines, and newspapers to use as raw material for their work. Longo always distinguished himself from colleagues like Cindy Sherman, Sherrie Levine, and Louise Lawler, who made photo-based art steeped in disillusionment and French theory. Longo's work was warmer, weirder, and distinctly handmade.
After beginning with sculptural pieces based on villains from noir films and Westerns, Longo achieved breakthrough success with "Men in the Cities," a 1977-83 series of drawings showing people dressed in business formal attire twisting dramatically through white voids. The "Men in the Cities" works remain electric because they contain central ambiguity – it's unclear whether these yuppie figures are dancing or being shot. However, this type of ambiguity began disappearing from Longo's work soon afterward and is now completely absent, replaced by grinding literalism.
Whether examining a 2023 work showing a drooping American flag or a 2021 work depicting the stars and stripes being flown in Minneapolis streets during a George Floyd protest, the current works simply tell Longo's intended audience what it already knows: something is fundamentally wrong in America. For viewers interested in understanding what exactly is wrong and why it's wrong – along with all the accompanying nuance – they would be better served looking elsewhere.
Longo would actually be better served sticking with his literalism rather than attempting to create metaphors. Pace Gallery, presumably with Longo's approval, felt it necessary to add a wall label next to "Untitled (Daytona Crash)," a 2025 drawing showing two race cars colliding, explaining that NASCAR serves as "a metaphor for the inexorable, indefatigable, and finely tuned American war machine." While fiery blazes, smashed car trunks, and flying tires certainly illustrate the same violence that the military-industrial complex thrives on, the metaphor feels forced when the exhibition simultaneously shows actual images from conflicts like the war in Ukraine.
Many artworks in the Pace exhibition are accompanied by explanatory wall texts, including one for Longo's drawing based on a Goya painting that provides useful context. It quotes from the Brooklyn Rail interview, in which Longo described redrawing Goya's "Third of May 1808" – a painting depicting a Spanish man being executed for resisting Napoleon – saying he turned to it in an attempt to deal with images from Gaza "in a way that was not too volatile or graphic." However, it's difficult to perceive this intention in the work itself, which resembles any other Pictures Generation artwork involving copying someone else's masterpiece as a statement about authorship.
The exhibition also features a new film titled "Untitled (Image Storm, July 4, 2024-September 9, 2025)," which presents a flow of 10,000 pictures speeding by so quickly that it's impossible to examine most of them properly. Periodically, the film comes to a screeching halt as a computer pauses on a single image. During one viewing, the computer lingered over a photograph of Mahmoud Khalil, the Columbia University pro-Palestine protest leader who was detained by ICE for 104 days despite his status as a legal permanent resident of the United States.
The significance of this particular image within the film's context remains unclear – why did the film stop there, and was this pause meaningful? However, before viewers can contemplate such questions or form coherent thoughts, Longo's film resumes, bombarding audiences with more rapidly cycling images. If editing images together in such quick succession that they appear to strobe incomprehensibly serves as a metaphor for our current rapid-fire media environment, it represents a tired and overused concept.
Ultimately, the experience of viewing Longo's exhibition at Pace Gallery generates a certain amount of relief upon completion – finally, everything has been seen. The show's title "The Weight of Hope" proves thuddingly obvious, emblematic of the grinding literalism that has replaced the compelling ambiguity of Longo's earlier career.
