Tuesday, December 30, 2003

Joanna Shaw-Eagle, the Chief Art critic for the Washington Times has an excellent review of Robert Longo: The Freud Cycle, Prints and Drawings" at David Adamson Gallery.

The show includes original drawings and gyclee reproductions of Longo's drawings centered around the artist's fascination with a book of photographs of Freud's apartment in Vienna.

Robert Longo has long been one of my favorite artists, although I suspect that his meticulous drawing style is not liked by many of our local art critics, suspicious as they are, of anything that implies technique and not art theory, or is not "new."

It is however, this meticulous technique, which really adapts well to the super-black pigments in which Adamson Editions has spectacularly reproduced them, is precisely what attracts me to his work, or to the work of the equally meticulous Vija Celmins.

Longo is a perfect example of what an artist, superbly confident in his technical vituosity, can accomplish when he marries his skill to interesting ideas and concepts, such as his fascination with the photographs about Freud's apartment. This show hangs until January 31st.

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