Artists

Robert Longo

Press release

We never just look at one thing; we are always looking at the relation between things and ourselves. Our vision is continually active, continually moving, continually holding things in a circle around itself, constituting what is present to us as we are. — John Berger, Ways of Seeing, 1972

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. — 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) 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 coincides with Longo’s major solo exhibitions at the ALBERTINA Museum, Vienna and Milwaukee Art Museum.