Robert Longo

Robert Longo is an American artist best known for his detailed photorealist drawings of jumping figures, sharks, tigers, and guns. Drawn in charcoal, graphite, and ink, his monochrome series Men in the City renders businessmen and women in a state of suspended animation, and brought the artist critical acclaim in the early 1980s. On 4 June 1938, after he had paid the 'The German Reich Escape Tax' and the 'Jew Property Tax', Sigmund Freud left his apartment in the Wiener Berggasse for the last time. A few days before his exile to London, the photographer Edmund Engelmann recorded and photographed his legendary rooms. In 1993 New York artist Robert Longo discovered a publication of these photographs and these constitute the basis of his cycle The Freud Drawings, which, since the year 2000 has grown to more than 30 large-size charcoal drawings. In his drawings, the deserted rooms, which partly show monstrous and strange attributes, become an admonition of a destroyed world.