Robert Longo

by Andrew Durbin (Contributor), Robert Longo (Artist)

This catalogue focuses on Robert Longo’s (born 1953) recent series of charcoal drawings of well-known Abstract Expressionist paintings. The original paintings are immediately recognizable, but it is the overlooked or imperceptible details of the complex surface, the tactility of the paint, the brushstrokes and the pattern of the canvas that Longo has made visible in his translation from color to black and white, paint to charcoal. Exploring his ambivalence toward painting, Longo’s drawings address the historical magnitude of Abstract Expressionism in art-historical and cultural contexts. Along with the Abstract Expressionist drawings, the book includes Longo’s enormous seven-panel drawing of the US Capitol building and a 17-foot high black wax– surfaced sculpture of an American flag that appears to collapse into or fall through the floor.

320 pages, Paperback

Published July 25, 2017

About the author

Andrew Durbin is the author of MacArthur Park (2017) and Skyland (2020), both from Nightboat Books. In 2018, MacArthur Park was a finalist for the Believer Book Award. His book about Peter Hujar and Paul Thek, The Wonderful World that Almost Was, is forthcoming from FSG and Granta in April 2026. He is the editor of Jacolby Satterwhite’s How lovely is me being as I am (Carnegie Mellon Press, 2021), Kevin Killian’s Fascination: Memoirs (Semiotexte, 2018), and the chapbook series Say bye to reason and hi to everything (Capricious, 2015). His fiction, criticism, and poetry have appeared in The Believer, BOMB, Boston Review, The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, The Paris Review, Triple Canopy, and elsewhere. He lives in London and is the editor-in-chief of frieze magazine.