Since directing Johnny Mnemonic and a making a sculpture from 40,000 bullets, the New Yorker has returned to the stunning photorealistic drawings that made him famous. He takes us round his latest show

‘I’m a mortician,” says Robert Longo, 71, clad in black and sporting a luxuriant grey bouffant. “I have an idea, then kill it by making it. Then I dress it for a funeral.” This may seem a strange way to describe your first British solo exhibition in seven years, but Longo’s “job” is even weirder than that. After he’s arranged the funeral, he has to do the eulogy, telling the media why what he’s done is worth seeing.

We’re sitting in the Thaddaeus Ropac gallery in Mayfair, London, before the corpse. In front of us is Untitled (Pilgrim), a multimedia installation consisting of five huge panels. Longo’s conceit is that each image has the same proportions as a mobile phone screen. “You swipe right through each image,” he explains. Its size suggests that Longo remains true to his mentor, sculptor Richard Serra. “Richard taught me in the 1970s and whenever I would see him later he’d say, ‘Still making big art?’”