Garage Museum of Contemporary Art, Moscow - Robert Longo - Sept. 30, 2016 > Feb. 5, 2017 @garage_mca @MetroPictures

"PROOF: FRANCISCO GOYA, SERGEI EISENSTEIN, ROBERT LONGO"

Robert Longo

presented by the gallery :

METRO PICTURES

519 West 24th Street New York, NY 10011

T 212 206 7100 e-mail: This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Garage Museum of Contemporary Art

9/32 Krymsky Val st., 119049, Moscow, Russia

+7 495 645-05-20 email : This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.

Sept. 30, 2016 > Feb. 5, 2017

Untitled (Cops), 2016. Charcoal on mounted paper, two panels, 101 x 140 in (256.5 x 355.6 cm)

Untitled
(The Haunting), 2005.
Courtesy of the artist. Collection of Siegfried Weishaupt.

Untitled
(Mike Test/Head of Goya), 2003.
Courtesy of the artist

Untitled
(Hellion), 2011.
Courtesy of the artist and Metro Pictures, New York.

Untitled (Guernica Redacted, After Picasso’s Guernica, 1937), 2014. Courtesy of the artist and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac

“As an artist, you are a reporter in the time that you live in,” says Robert Longo, who for more than 35 years has mined the daily bombardment of news media, as well as art history, for epochal images that he translates into cinematic billboard-sized charcoal drawings. “Both Goya and Eisenstein were clearly responding to the times they were living in. We’re all witnesses.”
Longo’s longtime artistic affinity with the Spanish painter who served church and king at the turn of the 19th century, and with the early 20th-century Russian filmmaker who worked for the state in the aftermath of the revolution, is explored in “Proof: Francisco Goya, Sergei Eisenstein, Robert Longo,” opening at the Garage Museum of Contemporary Art in Moscow on September 30th.
“The connection between them all is epic narratives,” says Kate Fowle, chief curator of the Garage, who had heard Longo speak over the years about the influence of Goya and Eisenstein on his work. She invited the 63-year-old, Brooklyn-based artist to collaborate on organizing this show, which creates a dialogue across three generations marked by war and civil unrest. “There’s a way in which they’re looking at the contemporary societies in which they lived, the politics and the cultural situation,” she says, “and making commentary on it without it being documentary or reportage.”
Although the three artists are known primarily for different media, Longo chose to focus on Goya’s etchings and Eisenstein’s storyboards to underscore the fundamental importance of black-and-white drawing to them all. During two extensive research trips to Russia, Longo discovered that the State Central Museum of Contemporary History of Russia (formerly the Museum of the Revolution) in Moscow had a complete and pristine set of some 400 aquatint etchings from all four of Goya’s major suites—a gift from Spain to Russia in appreciation for the country’s aid in helping them try to fight off Franco.