ROBERT LONGO: THE WEIGHT OF HOPE

Pace is pleased to present “The Weight of Hope”, a monumental exhibition by Robert Longo, in New York

September 11 – October 25, 2025

The Weight of Hope will highlight Longo’s enduring engagement with social and political happenings in his work across mediums, bringing together large-scale charcoal drawings, films, sculptures, and studies—including private and institutional loans—created between 2014 and 2025. This landmark show at Pace will open on the heels of the artist’s first full-scale Scandinavian survey, on view at the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art in Denmark through August 31, and his presentation of a new multimedia work at Art Basel Unlimited in June.

Over the past decade, the artist has increasingly turned his focus to images from the media, including coverage of the January 6 United States Capitol attack and the Black Lives Matter movement. Building up his hyper realistic, black-and- white charcoal drawings in layers with painstaking attention to light and shadow, he creates highly detailed works based on news photography as well as images of protests, civil unrest, and war on the Internet. Transforming his source images into epically scaled, emotionally resonant compositions, he reflects on power, violence, and national mythmaking.

In his first solo exhibition at Metro Pictures in New York in 1981, Longo showed his charcoal and graphite Men in the Cities drawings, works that became icons of the “Pictures Generation.” This group, which includes Longo, Sherman, Prince, Louise Lawler, and David Salle, is known for critiquing the anaesthetizing power of consumer capitalism and the indoctrinating effects of mass media through their art.