Richard Long (b 1945, England) has been at the forefront of art for forty years, pioneering new ideas and directions in earth, minimal and conceptual art. Richard Cork has suggested that through the use of sculpture, text, photography and wall works Long achieves ‘the remarkable feat of drawing inspiration from the most ancient sculptural forms and at the same time contributing to adventurous notions about the sculpture of his own period.’ From the action and imprint of a walk, to the temporary placement of a stone, from piles of stones placed on the gallery floor to mud smeared upon the walls with his hands, Richard Long redefines the very parameters of what can be considered and understood as sculpture.
Richard Long is a landscape artist; for him, the landscape is at once the medium and subject of his work. His art is, as he says, ‘the story of home and away’. Long has walked and made work in England, Ireland and Scotland, as well as Death Valley, California, the Sahara desert, the Himalayas, Mongolia and Peru. He walks at different times for different reasons. At times, these are predetermined courses and concepts, such as in A Line of 164 Stones, a Walk of 164 Miles (1974). Yet equally, for the artist, the idea of the walk may assert itself in an arbitrary circumstance. For Cloudless Walk (1995) he comments ‘I noticed that it was completely blue skies each day, so I decided to finish the walk when I saw the first cloud - a three and a half day walk from the mouth of the Loire to the first cloud. The walk started at a very solid geographic place and ended, by chance, with an ephemeral phenomenon like a cloud.’ This particularly ephemeral approach began with the making of works such as A Line Made by Walking (1967) in which he wore a path in the grass by walking back and forth in a straight line, and recorded it in a photograph. By 1970, Long had begun making works in some far parts of the globe, frequently in challenging and remote terrains, documenting his walks with texts, maps and photographs, and leaving spirals, circles and lines or a pile of rocks in his wake. It is the legacy of Long’s work, that sculpture may exist not only in space but also in memory, or in the imagination as a narrative.
Richard Long participated in the first international manifestations of both Arte Povera, in Amalfi, Italy in 1968, and Earth Art, at Cornell University, New York in 1969. Nearly forty years on, his work continues the dialectic between working freely and ephemerally ‘wherever in the wide world’, and bringing it back into the public domain of art spaces and books in the form of sculptures of raw materials such as stones, mud and water and photographic and text works.
Richard Long was born in Bristol, and studied at the West of England College of Art, before graduating from St Martin’s School of Art and Design, London in 1968. Within a year he became closely associated with the emergence of Land Art. Long has exhibited extensively at museums and galleries internationally, recently holding solo exhibitions at Haunch of Venison, London and Berlin (2003, 2006, 2008), ‘The Path is the Place is the Line’, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2006), ‘Walking and Marking’, Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2007) and at the Musee d’Art Moderne et d’Art Contemporain, Nice, France (2008). The artist has won numerous awards and honours, and his work features in many important public and private collections worldwide, including Tate, London, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, among many others.
Tate Britain has held a major survey of Richard Long’s work in the summer of 2009. He has been awarded the highest international distinction for achievement in the arts, the Praemium Imperiale Prize for Sculpture, in autumn 2009.
