Robert Longo (born January 7, 1953) is an American painter and sculptor.

Robert Longo was born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York and raised in Long Island. He had a childhood fascination with mass media: movies, television, magazines, and comic books, which continue to influence his art.

Longo became famous in the 1980s for his "Men in the Cities" series, which illustrated sharply dressed businessmen writhing in contorted agony.

Longo began college at the University of North Texas, in the town of Denton, but left before getting a degree. He later studied sculpture under Leonda Finke, who encouraged him to pursue a career in the visual arts. In 1972, Longo received a grant to study at the Accademia di Belle Arti in Florence, Italy. Upon his return to New York, Longo enrolled at Buffalo State College, where he received a BFA in 1975. In college, Longo and his friends established an avant-garde art gallery in their co-op building, which was originally a converted ice factory; the gallery became Hallwalls Contemporary Art Center. Through his gallery efforts, Longo met many local and New York City artists. Longo eventually moved to New York City to join the underground art scene of the 1970s.

Although he studied sculpture, drawing remained Longo's favorite form of self-expression. However, the sculptural influence pervades his drawing technique, as Longo's "portraits" have a distinctive chiseled line that seems to give the drawings a three-dimensional quality. Longo uses graphite like clay, molding it to create images like the writhing, dancing figures in his seminal "Men in the Cities" series.

Working on themes of power and authority, Longo produced a series of blackened American flags ("Black Flags" 1989-91) as well as oversized hand guns ("Bodyhammers" 1993-95). From 1995-1996 he worked on his "Magellan" project, 366 drawings (one per day) that formed an archive of the artist's life and surrounding cultural images. "Magellan" was followed by 2002's "Freud Drawings", which reinterpreted Edmund Engelman's famous documentary images of Sigmund Freud's flat, moments before his flight from the Nazis. In 2002 and 2004 he presented "Monsters," Bernini-esque renderings of massive breaking waves and "The Sickness of Reason," baroque renderings of atomic bomb blasts. "Monsters" was included in the 2004 Whitney Biennial.

Longo had major retrospective exhibitions at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art in 1989, the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago in 1990, and a touring exhibition throughout Japan in 1995.

To create works such as Barbara and Ralph, Longo projects photographs of his subjects onto paper and traces the figures in graphite, removing all details of the background. After he records the basic contours, his assistant, Diane Shea, works on the figure for about a week, filling in the details. Next, Longo goes back into the drawing, using graphite and charcoal to provide "all the cosmetic work."Artist's Website Longo continues to work on the drawing, making numerous adjustments until it is completed about a week later.

The process of making a lithograph is equally involved. Studio assistants do the basic work, a practice that has a long precedent in classical art.

Biographical information from Wikipedia