Robert Longo - Contemporary Art Day Sale New York Friday, May 11, 2012 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Metro Pictures, New York
    Charles Foley Gallery, Columbus, Ohio

  • Exhibited

    The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Robert Longo Retrospective 1976-1989; Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, 1989 (another example exhibited)

  • Literature

    H. Drohojowska, "The 80s Stop Making Sense", Art News, October 1989, pp. 146-151 (another example illustrated on the cover)

  • Catalogue Essay

    Isolated in the white blankness of their uniform background, Longo's drawings of urban men display a formal beauty that disguises their unsettling content. The descriptions of men and women are ambiguous—we will never learn whether it a dance of joy or the gestures of infantile grief; whether it is the spinning fall of the victim or of the assassin, which Longo has singled out to be locked into visual performance...In his earlier work, Longo used to derive his images from movie stills, but at present, he creates his own sources. He photographs his friends in countless poses, carefully screens the images for their dynamic content, and then enlarges those he selects into drawings, Clad in the black armor of formal business suits, Longo's figures become anonymous as people. They become personifications of universal feelings and anxieties, pathetic in their dehumanization, objects in the hands of their creator.
    (C. Kotik, Figures, Forms and Expressions, Albright/CEPA, 1981)

151

Untitled (Men in Cities)

1984
charcoal, graphite and ink on paper
49 1/2 x 37 3/4 in. (125.7 x 95.9 cm)
Signed and dated "Robert Longo 84" lower right.

Estimate
$100,000 - 150,000 

Sold for $170,500

Contemporary Art Day Sale

Contemporary Art Day
11 May 2012
New York