Robert Longo
Market Performance
Robert Longo is one of America's most critically and commercially significant contemporary artists, with a secondary market anchored by Christie's, Sotheby's, and Phillips. His large-scale charcoal drawings — among the most technically demanding works in contemporary art — regularly achieve six-figure results, with major works approaching seven figures. His prints and works on paper offer accessible entry points into a practice whose reputation and market value have grown continuously since the 1980s.
Life and Practice
Born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, Robert Longo studied at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence and the State University of New York at Buffalo. He emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s as a founding figure of the Pictures Generation, a group of artists — including Cindy Sherman, Richard Prince, and Sherrie Levine — whose practice engaged critically with mass media imagery. His Men in the Cities series (1979–83) — large-scale charcoal drawings of suited figures writhing in ambiguous states between ecstasy and violence — made him internationally famous. His subsequent series, including the Combines and Body Hammers, expanded his engagement with mass media, corporate culture, and political imagery. He lives and works in New York.
Series Overview
Longo's most celebrated series, Men in the Cities, depicts figures in dramatic motion against blank backgrounds, drawn from photographs of friends and associates. His later Bodies works explored the abstraction of the human form under force. More recently, his large-scale charcoal drawings have taken on subjects including nuclear weapons, oceanic imagery, and news photographs rendered with extraordinary precision and scale.
Museum Collections
Longo's work is held by the Museum of Modern Art (New York), the Whitney Museum, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Albright-Knox Art Gallery, and major collections internationally.
Buying/Selling with Guy Hepner
Guy Hepner works with collectors seeking Robert Longo prints, drawings, and unique works. Contact us to discuss available inventory or consignment.
