Death Star
Robert Longo
Contemporary Art Sculpture Fabrication
Art Direction & Collaboration
Fabrication by Konstantinos Papalexiou
and Brett Douglas
of Neoset
“Death Star,” which debuted at Art Basel in Switzerland on June 14, is a massive ball composed of 40,000 bullets, a number that approximates the overwhelming number of U.S. citizens killed by guns over a year. The work is an update, of sorts, of a project—also called Death Star—that Longo completed in 1993 and composed of 18,000 .38-caliber bullets
To compose the random sequencing of bullets—each attached by hand—the artist worked with our fabrication team Neoset. Longo didn’t want any recognizable patterns—because gun violence doesn’t have one. The 2-ton result, which took over a year to complete, will be presented by Metro Pictures and Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac at Unlimited, a curated platform for projects that transcend the classical art fair booths. Death Star will sit in darkness, with a high-intensity spotlight attached to the I-beam. As you walk toward it, the horizon of the edge starts to glow. “It’s very trippy,” Longo says, “because when you first see it you’re not quite sure what it is. Once you get right up to it and you realize it’s made of bullets, it becomes rather shocking. The amount of bullets is pretty insane.”—Newsweek Magazine
