Robert Longo

C-Class, C 180/W 202, 1998

Commissioned by the Group and taking up Andy Warhol’s unfinished Cars series, Robert Longo depicted several car models in 1995/97. He created four large-format drawings, Cars From Above, showing models of the 1980s and 1990s. Longo’s characteristically hyper-realistic approach – choosing familiar subjects from the media picture machinery and isolating these from their original context in larger-than-life-size black-and-white drawings – works against the rapid glance at gleaming surfaces. Instead, Longo’s work creates a problem around the standard, ‘black-and-white’ thought patterns people use to persuade themselves they would understand and consume the world. The black bodywork Untitled (Black Car) seems to be illuminated from within, a blazingly brightly lit space is held together by the ‘architecture’ of the external space. The strongly shaded, modeled version C-Class, C180/W 202 is characterized by the interaction of apparently diffuse structures within a design in intermediate tones. Statics, the factual presence of the car slips away into a fictitious, immaterial, visionary ‘dream’.