(born 1953 in New York)
Sleeping Family, signed, dated Robert Longo 83 and with artist’s sign, Laquer on synthetic material, lacquered, 168 x 122 x 18.5 cm, (PS)

Literature:
Carter Ratcliff, Robert Longo, Munic 1985, cp. Nr.15 (cast bronze)

The relief ‘Sleeping Family’ from 1983 plainly reveals the close ties between sculpture and sketching that have emerged in Robert Longo’s work over the last seven years. In his early pieces, Longo elevated the delicate medium of sketching to a monument scale, demanding authority, lending his figures a three-dimensionality suggestive of his personal perception of reality: “The graphite is smeared into the paper, almost formed like a sculpture”(1). The relief, set in glossy silver paint, reveals close correlations with, or even emerges from, his sketched artwork. The production technique that Longo applied involved creating larger-than-life figures on 240 cm sheets, which he then assembled to form a relief, bearing traces of his affinity for sketching, which themselves lend the cast figures a graphic outline.
“My work”, says Robert Longo “is as monumental as it is filmic.”(2).
Like the medium of film itself (and less the content the films convey), Longo’s work can be perceived as two or three-dimensional, as immobile or also animate. It does not manifest at a particular location, and time appears brought to a standstill. The human figures are bequeathed a certain transparency, verging on invisibility. The layered, apparently haphazard arrangement of the bodies confronts onlookers with all that they have experienced, and all that they associate, with movement and stasis, with dance and with death, insouciance and danger. The impressions gyrate and return, transformed at times, to the field of vision. Longo speaks of how this repetition precipitates in his pieces a sense “of repetition, rhythmic structure otherwise found in songs.”(3).

(1) Robert Longo, Talking about The Sword of the Pig, London 1988, The Tate Gallery, p.6 (2)Robert Longo, Carter Ratcliff, Robert Longo, Munich 1985, p. 11 (3)Robert Longo, ibid., p. 16

The work was cast 6 times, each with different material and finish. We are grateful to Metro Pictures for the kind information.