Robert Longo: Angels of the Maelstrom

Pace presents Angels of the Maelstrom, an exhibition of new and recent charcoal drawings and sculptures by Robert Longo, at its Tokyo gallery, which opened on April 16 and will run through June 17. In this presentation, which marks his first solo exhibition in Japan in three decades, Longo examines the cultural influences and exchanges between Japan and America and how the two cultures have shaped his work. His last solo exhibition in Japan was his 1995 retrospective at Tokyo’s Isetan Museum of Art, which traveled to Ashikaga City Museum and Osaka’s Kirin Plaza Art Space.

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 while also proposing hope for the future.

Robert Longo Untitled (Gardenia for Mary), 2026 WORK ON PAPER charcoal on mounted paper 40" × 50" (101.6 cm × 127 cm), image 45" × 55" × 3- 9/16" (114.3 cm × 139.7 cm × 9 cm), frame © 2026 Robert Longo/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

While creating work for his exhibition at Pace Tokyo, Longo was inspired by Paul Klee’s watercolor monoprint Angelus Novus (1920), in which a curious angel is poised to either take flight or surrender. The piece was once owned by the German philosopher Walter Benjamin, who referred to the angel in his 1940 essay “On the Concept of History” as a witness to the future, an “angel of history,” whose “face is turned toward the past […] But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future.”

4.Robert Longo Untitled (AmericanSamurai),2025WORK ON PAPER charcoal on mounted paper51"×80" (129.5 cm×203.2 cm), image 56"×85"×3-9/16" (142.2 cm×215.9 cm×9 cm), frame ©2026 Robert Longo/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NewYork

Longo’s investigations into allegorical mythologies and ancient archetypes that span cultures incorporate an array of loaded icons: a crashing wave, a submerged whale, a blooming peony. The centerpiece of his presentation across the gallery’s two floors is Untitled (American Samurai), a drawing of the Japanese baseball player, the superstar of the Los Angeles Dodgers, Shohei Ohtani. For the artist, Ohtani’s legacy as one of the best players of a quintessentially American pastime speaks powerfully to the collision of the two cultures.

Robert Longo: Angels of the Maelstrom 2F; Azabudai Hills GardenPlaza-A,5-8-1 Toranomon, Minato-Ku, Tokyo April 16 – June 17, 2026 Photography courtesy Pace Gallery

Highlights also include new drawings of subjects from the natural world—including an arresting portrait of a tiger baring its teeth, an image of a cresting wave inspired by Hokusai, a misty mountain range, and blooming flowers—and iconic American figures from the 20th century: John F. Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy Onassis, as well as Elvis Presley. Born in 1953 in Brooklyn, New York, Longo was deeply influenced by social and political issues from an early age. He graduated high school in 1970, weeks after the Ohio National Guard massacred several students at Kent State University who were protesting the US invasion of Cambodia—including one of Longo’s former classmates, whose body was shown in a Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph that shocked the world. In 1973, Longo enrolled at Buffalo State College, where he trained as a sculptor and began his decades-long friendship with fellow artist Cindy Sherman. The two moved to New York together in 1977, and, throughout the 1980s, Longo frequently performed in New York rock clubs in Menthol Wars, his band with Richard Prince. During this period, he also designed album covers for numerous bands and directed music videos for New Order and R.E.M.

Robert Longo Untitled (JFK & Jackie, Zapruder Still), 2026 WORK ON PAPER charcoal on mounted paper 28" × 42" (71.1 cm × 106.7 cm), image 33" × 47" × 3- 9/16" (83.8 cm × 119.4 cm × 9 cm), frame © 2026 Robert Longo/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

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 anesthetizing power of consumer capitalism and the indoctrinating effects of mass media through their art. Working with diverse materials at increasingly ambitious scales over the course of his career, Longo cemented himself as a preeminent artist of his generation. Today, his work can be found in the collections of major museums around the world, including the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, and Brooklyn Museum in New York; the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.; the Milwaukee Art Museum; the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; the Albertina Museum in Vienna; the Centre Pompidou in Paris; the Tate in London; the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam; and many other international institutions.

Robert Longo Untitled (Immortal Glass), 2026 WORK ON PAPER charcoal on mounted paper 60" × 40" (152.4 cm × 101.6 cm), image 65" × 45" × 3-9/16" (165.1 cm × 114.3 cm × 9 cm), frame © 2026 Robert Longo/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York.

Robert Longo (b. 1953, Brooklyn, New York) lived and works in New York. He received a BFA from State University of New York College at Buffalo, in 1975. Important solo exhibitions of his work include Robert Longo: the Freud drawings, Haus Lange/Haus Esters, Krefeld, Germany, which traveled to The Albertina Museum, Vienna (2003); Robert Longo: The Capitol Project, The Aldrich Museum of Contemporary Art, Ridgefield, Connecticut (2013); Robert Longo: The Destroyer Cycle, Metro Pictures, New York (2017); Robert Longo: Storm of Hope: Law & Disorder, Palm Springs Art Museum, California (2021); Robert Longo Drawings: Engines of State, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (2023); Robert Longo, The Albertina Museum, Vienna (2024), which traveled to the Louisiana Museum of Modern Art, Humlebæk, Denmark (2025); and Robert Longo: The Acceleration of History, Milwaukee Art Museum, Wisconsin (2024–25). Longo’s work is held in multiple collections worldwide, including The Albertina Museum, Vienna; The Art Institute of Chicago; Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Harvard Art Museums, Cambridge, Massachusetts; Los Angeles County Museum of Art; and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, among others.

Pace is a leading international art gallery representing some of the most influential contemporary artists and estates from the past century, holding decades-long relationships with Alexander Calder, Jean Dubuffet, Barbara Hepworth, Agnes Martin, Louise Nevelson, and Mark Rothko. Pace enjoys a unique U.S. heritage spanning East and West coasts through its early support of artists central to the Abstract Expressionist and Light and Space movements.

Since its founding by Arne Glimcher in 1960, Pace has developed a distinguished legacy as an artist-first gallery that mounts seminal historical and contemporary exhibitions. Under the current leadership of CEO Marc Glimcher, Pace continues to support its artists and share their visionary work with audiences worldwide by remaining at the forefront of innovation. Now in its seventh decade, the gallery advances its mission through a robust global program— comprising exhibitions, artist projects, public installations, institutional collaborations, performances, and interdisciplinary projects. Pace has a legacy in art bookmaking and has published over five hundred titles in close collaboration with artists, with a focus on original scholarship and on introducing new voices to the art historical canon.

Today, Pace has seven locations worldwide, including European footholds in London and Geneva as well as Berlin, where the gallery established an office in 2023. Pace maintains two galleries in New York—its headquarters at 540 West 25th Street, which welcomed almost 120,000 visitors and programmed 20 shows in its first six months, and an adjacent 8,000 sq. ft. exhibition space at 510 West 25th Street. Pace’s long and pioneering history in California includes a gallery in Palo Alto, which was open from 2016 to 2022. Pace’s engagement with Silicon Valley’s technology industry has had a lasting impact on the gallery at a global level, accelerating its initiatives connecting art and technology as well as its work with experiential artists. Pace consolidated its West Coast activity through its flagship in Los Angeles, which opened in 2022. Pace was one of the first international galleries to establish outposts in Asia, where it operates permanent gallery spaces in Hong Kong and Seoul, along with an office and viewing room in Beijing. In spring 2024, Pace will open its first gallery space in Japan in Tokyo’s new Azabudai Hills development.

For more information about this exhibition and others, please visit the Pace Gallery’s website here . Pace Gallery can be found on Instagram

Robert Longo: Angels of the Maelstrom

ALIOUNE DIAGNE: Saytu