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Robert Longo was a little nervous about opening a big show in Denmark this year.

By Carl Swanson

Photographs by D’Angelo Lovell Williams

ROBERT LONGO HAS had a studio on the top floor of a 19th-century Italianate building in SoHo since 1984. It’s creaky (and a little bit leaky) but still rather grand, having been built in the 1840s as an Odd Fellows hall: The working-class fraternal organization was at one point larger than Freemasonry. “You’re lucky the elevator worked. I can’t walk up anymore,” he tells me, rubbing his knee, when I meet him in the high-ceilinged, smudgy-walled space this past spring. I ask if there are other artists in the building and he says no. “I eat them,” he adds.