An exhibition of new work by Robert Longo, revisiting his monumental Combine formats of the 1980s and John Berger's 'Ways of Seeing' to challenge our consumption of images in the digital age.

I think art is my form of an act of civil resistance. I’m very disappointed in what’s going on in the world. My work has been a direct response to the pictorial climate that we live in. I’m ripping images out of the image storm. For London I wanted to do something a little bit more metaphorical and poetic. — Robert Longo, 2024

Robert Longo re-envisages his Combines of the 1980s in Searchers, a two-part exhibition presented at Thaddaeus Ropac and Pace in London. His monumental new multimedia works reflect the breadth of the American artist’s career-long experimentation with the visual potential of different media. On view at Thaddaeus Ropac, Untitled (Pilgrim) (2024) extends to over seven metres in width and is composed of five panels, each executed in a different medium. Comprising a charcoal drawing, a video, a painting, a sculpture and a photograph, in the new works Longo explores the potential of ‘making a Combine in every way to see an image’ and, as the artist explains, in ‘almost every way that I could work.’ Conceived as a pair, Untitled (Pilgrim) will be presented concurrently with a second new combine, Untitled (Hunter), on view at Pace, and coinciding with Longo’s major solo exhibitions at the ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna and Milwaukee Art Museum.

Robert Longo made the first body of works he refers to as Combines between 1982 and 1989, a mixture of relief, photography, drawing, silkscreen, sculpture and painting named after Robert Rauschenberg’s earlier pioneering Combines (1954–64). Longo devised the Combine format to extend his investigation into the multiple meanings that might emerge from different images, media and technologies. Just as his Men in the Cities (1979–83) drawings were not intended to be seen as isolated images but rather ‘in sequences’, the Combines assembled drawings and paintings with sculptural elements made from wood, metal and Plexiglas in what the artist conceptualises as a ‘collision’ or montage, giving rise to new meanings.

The idea of montage has always been in my vocabulary... When you put images next to each other, what happens? I’m not interested in pastiche or collage. I’m interested in collision.

With the new Combines Longo explores the idea of the artist as a ‘searcher’ as he actively seeks out images from the world around him. Informed by Soviet film director Sergei Eisenstein’s theory of montage and art critic John Berger’s foundational text Ways of Seeing (1972), he juxtaposes art-historical images with film stills, advertisements, videos of elemental forces and journalistic photographs of natural and human catastrophes to examine how meaning is made and disseminated in contemporary society. Returning to the format after four decades, Longo offers a re-reading of John Berger in the context of our digital age, particularly the impact of social media on our strategies of interpretation, with each panel of the new works evoking the proportions of a mobile phone screen, recalling the sensation of endless scrolling through social media.

About the artist
Robert Longo was born in New York, where he lives and works today. After graduating from the State University College in Buffalo, he moved to New York with Cindy Sherman in 1977, becoming studio assistant to Vito Acconci and Dennis Oppenheim. That same year, he participated in the formative five-person show Pictures. This was followed in 1981 by his first solo exhibition, debuting the Men in the Cities drawings that established his early career.

His work has been shown at documenta, Kassel, in 1982 and 1987, the Whitney Biennial, New York, in 1983 and 2004, and the Venice Biennale in 1997. He has been the subject of recent solo exhibitions at the Milwaukee Art Museum, WI (forthcoming, 2024); Albertina Museum, Vienna (forthcoming, 2024); Hall Art Foundation, Reading, VT (2024); National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2023); Palm Springs Art Museum (2021–22); and Hall Art Foundation, Derneburg, Germany (2020). His works were also shown alongside those of Francisco Goya and Sergei Eisenstein in Proof, which travelled from the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow (2016) to the Brooklyn Museum, New York (2017) and Deichtorhallen Hamburg (2018).