Untitled (Destroyed Head of Lamassu, Nineveh)

Robert Longo translates photographs into detailed and ambitiously scaled charcoal drawings to explore the politics of image-making. Not direct copies, they combine images from multiple sources to create a fictional paradigmatic image. Longo first came to public attention in 1977 as one of the five artists included in the legendary "Pictures" show at Artists Space in New York, an exhibition that defined a generation of artists who appropriated and decontextualized popular media to question notions of originality and authorship.

Untitled (Destroyed Head of Lamassu, Nineveh) belongs to Longo’s series The Destroyer Cycle that grapples with global conflicts and the loss of cultural history. Here, Longo depicts an ancient Assyrian lamassu statue toppled by ISIS militants following the Iraq War. The figure of the lamassu, a Mesopotamian protective deity with a winged bull body and human head, is rendered with hyper-realism in charcoal. Longo sets the carved and grisaille surface of the sculpture against a rich black ground, replicating the black-and-white language of historical news photography. In this way, he re-engages pictures through drawing to question the veracity of the photographic medium and draft a composite version of the truth.