For the series 'Seven questions with...' Art UK publishes interviews with emerging and established artists working today.

Robert Longo's career spans over four decades. Born and raised in New York City, where he continues to live and work, Longo's artwork has always been grounded in drawing. His early series Men in the Cities debuted in 1981, and he has continued to explore the potential of the medium ever since. He has also worked on films, music videos, paintings and sculpture. His most recent work, including a series of multimedia installations he calls Combines, is currently on view in London at PACE Gallery and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac. His retrospective at the Albertina Museum in Vienna is on view until January 2025.

Eliza Goodpasture, Art UK: How has your drawing practice influenced the trajectory of your work?

Robert Longo: Drawing is the basis of all art. It's the most direct way of working. I think it's also a tradition of learning to observe. When you draw, you actually have to look. I think drawing requires a level of observation that is really critical to being an artist. A lot of artists can't draw and I'm always very suspicious of that. As an American, I remember being in Europe and being in museums and watching people copy Rembrandts and Caravaggios and things like that. But American classical art is Abstract Expressionism, so in America, people don't really have chops. And the people who have chops end up working in Hollywood painting backdrops, you know? So, I don't think a lot of contemporary artists can draw. I'm drawing all the time. It's like writing, it's a form of language. Drawing is the foundation of everything.

Eliza: How do you think the perception of drawing has changed over the course of your career? Do you think there is a negative perception of working on paper among contemporary artists?

Robert: When I was making drawings in the beginning [in the 1980s], all my friends were doing photographs and films and videos. I didn't have any money, so to make a long story short I took home some backdrop paper and just started to draw. I realised I could do with drawing what I wanted to do; I didn't have to make photographs. I took drawing to this obscene point where I wanted to compete with movies and magazines and television. It's a weird zone because when I tell people I make charcoal drawings they think I'm making these little, tiny things, but I'm not. It's amazing to make something out of dust.

I'm doing this show at the Albertina, which has the greatest drawing collection in Europe – they have the Dürers and Rembrandts, you know. The director there saw my early drawing series of Freud's apartment, and he realised that drawings could be really big. He had just taken over the Albertina at the time and he realised the Albertina needed to be come into the twenty-first century. He excavated the basement of the Albertina to make a huge space where he started to do exhibitions of big drawings. He told me that my work made him realise that drawings don't have to be these little, tiny things anymore, they can be big, colourful, whatever. So, this show I have now in Vienna, it's basically all my work from 1981 to now. There's one sculpture in it, but it's basically all drawing.

'Robert Longo', The ALBERTINA Museum, installation view, 2024

Eliza: I wanted to ask you about scale and these huge works you make. I'd love to hear how you want people to interact with it.

Robert: In America, if it's big it's good. If it's big and shiny, it's even better. I always go back to the Abstract Expressionists because the scale of their work really moved me. Those giant Jackson Pollock paintings… And I mean, I wanted to compete with movies and everything. I always sit in the front row of a movie theatre. I like when something kind of takes you over so you can't see anything else. I remember reading about how [Mark] Rothko used to put his biggest paintings in the smallest rooms, so you really are enveloped in them. Scale is important because it reflects my commitment to the work. I'm willing to spend this much time making something that big. I make studies that are small, but basically, I like big stuff.

Eliza: I want to ask how you think about other mediums and the interactions between them. What led you to make work like the Combines series you have on view now?

Robert: The idea of the simultaneous realities fascinates me. You know, you're navigating different mediums all the time. John Berger's Ways of Seeing, how you can see things in different mediums, became really interesting. My degree from university is in sculpture – the materiality is really important to me. My drawings are, in a weird way, almost more carving than drawing. The last thing I do is erasing, carving the image out.

I did this body of work called the Combines from 1982 to 1988: they kind of exploded onto the world. I always imagine them like a sequence, like guitar chords in a Sex Pistols song, you know, dun dun dun. Cindy [Sherman] and I bought a colour TV and that changed everything, so I started working in colour. If you look at those early Combines it is a bit like colour television. And I realised I could work in any medium I wanted at that point. One of the things Manet and the Impressionists and the early Modernists did was free the artist to do whatever they wanted.

Men in the Cities (triptych), installation view

Eliza: Tell me more about how John Berger influenced your most recent work.

Robert: It's just this idea of all the different ways you could see. I love that it gave me the freedom that I could do whatever I wanted. I realised I was disturbed by the fact that people think I went from the Men in the Cities drawings to my charcoal drawings because they are both black and white, and the work in the middle got forgotten. Those Combine pieces are in all these major museums, they were really successful but then the end of the 1980s happened and that work became very '80s. I think this current work looks very '80s. Sometimes I think we are nostalgic for the future. In America, we are nostalgic for patriotism, but that's a whole different fucked-up thing.

Eliza: I also want to hear about your conception of narrative. You've talked about how the Combines embody an unreadable narrative: there is a sense of narrative, but you can't quite unpick what it is. How do you think about readability?

Robert: Patterns are the visual equivalent of narrative. Because I'm dyslexic, I didn't really start reading until I was in my 30s, so I don't know a lot of stories. Some of my closest friends are great writers – Richard Price is one of my closest friends. I'm always amazed at writing. I remember seeing this guy in Paris, in a cake store. He had a huge piece of wax paper, and he put a huge blob of whipped cream in the middle and then he rolled it into a cone and started writing on a cake with it. That's what writing is like: you take all this shit and make it come out of a pencil. I'm so amazed that Richard wrote this book and constructs this narrative. I want you to want to see a narrative, but when you go down that road, I want to make it really difficult, so it activates other stuff, too. I make art that is a car crash rather than a pastiche.

Rally for late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny in Athens, Greece – 19 Feb 2024

Eliza: Aside from what we've already talked about, what are the other main sources of inspiration for you right now?

Robert: The world. The fucking world we live in, how can you ignore it? I can't avoid it. Artists are the recorders of the time we live in. There are people that fashion the truth and people that tell it. I'm interested in trying to tell the truth. Art is an advertisement for believing in something, but it has no sponsor. Although if you look at the history of art, the tribe first told the guys what to paint on the cave walls, then the church, then the government… But with modern art, all of a sudden, the artist was free. You could make whatever you wanted. Inspiration to me is the world I live in. I'm trying to always slow down the image storm we're in, record these images that are so fleeting and make them become accountable somehow.

Eliza Goodpasture, Commissioning Editor – Drawings at Art UK

This content was funded by the Bridget Riley Art Foundation