Robert Longo
Of Men and Monsters
24.02.09 – 09.05.09
Platz der Republik
60265 Frankfurt/Main
Germany
Entrance: Cityhaus 1, from Friedrich-Ebert-Anlage
Opening hours:
Tues. – Sat. 11 a.m. – 7 p.m. / closed Sundays and Mondays
For further details, call +49-69-7447-2386
or mail kunst [at] dzbank.de
www.dzbank.de
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It is not pure coincidence that this first exhibition in the new Art Foyer is devoted to the American artist Robert Longo. It shows works from three series, for the first time in this context, which span a creative period of over 25 years from the late 1970s to the present. This is also the period in which most of the works in the DZ BANK art collection originate.Longo’s works from The Freud Cycle (2002) exhibit strong parallels to Gerhard Richter’s “photo-painting” method. For his black and white painting cycle 18. Oktober 1977 (1988), Richter took as his starting point police photos of the bodies in Stammheim which were published in illustrated magazines. In the late 1990s, Longo came across a publication containing documentary photos which Edmund Engelman had taken in 1938 in Freud’s apartment and practice at Berggasse 19, Vienna, during the latter’s emigration to London, where Freud, who was seriously ill, died one year later. Engelman’s photographs in particular, but also some other photographs, formed the starting point for Longo’s The Freud Drawings, a series of large charcoal drawings. The smaller black and white Iris prints in this exhibition are based on these drawings.
Freud’s path to psychoanalysis took him via research into hysteria and Jean–Martin Charcot, who originally wanted to be a painter. The major role the latter’s photographic iconography played for his psychiatric practise is well known. The Surrealists discerned a “convulsive beauty” in it. If we consider Longo’s series Men in the Cities (1979-81/2005) and his Freud Cycle together, we especially notice the similarity of the human images with those historical, scientific photographs. Both stage “attitudes passionelles”. One twist to Longo’s iconography of urban gestures in the capital city of the 20th century is its mysteriousness and interchangeability.
Pictures are about pictures. Thus Longo’s group of works entitled Monsters (2005) is also a “series noir”. And in this series of monster waves once again, based on many of his own and other photographs, the references to art history jump out at us, from Hokusai through Courbet to Sugimoto. In a certain way, photography in the 20th century repeats the history of painting. However, what is more important for Longo is that he – and the works in this exhibition obviously do this – appears to be captivated by our fascination of film, power (as in the elementary natural power of waves) and spectacle: the power of images.
Although Men in the Cities was inspired by a film still (from Fassbinder’s Der amerikanische Soldat; 1970) and Robert Longo’s wave pictures make reference to both iconic and loud spectacles with subtitles like “Godzilla”, the monumental thing about these Monsters, as, ultimately, in his other two series too, is above all the stillness. As the artist himself stresses, “I am interested in stillness.”
