Richard Long

born 1945 in Bristol, England
lives and works in Bristol

One of the best-known British land artists, Richard Long is one of a generation of artists who, from the 1960s, helped redefine sculpture and expand its possibilities. Like Gilbert & George, Long came out of St Martins School of Art. While Gilbert & George became ‘living sculptures’, Long began to use walking and his encounters with the landscape as a form of art. Long has said he wanted to use the landscape in new ways. Using natural materials like grass and water, he started making work outside, and, according to Long, this led to the idea of making a sculpture by walking. His A line made by walking was made in 1967 when he was only 22 and was his first walk in the landscape as art. A straight line in a grass field, going ‘nowhere’, was a kind of abstract art made in real space and time. Then Long would make maps, recording very simple but formal walks. On his website he has stated, ‘Each walk, though not by definition conceptual, realised a particular idea. Thus walking – as art – provided a simple way for me to explore relationships between time, distance, geography and measurement.’ He has identified his prototype landscape as plateau-like, treeless, but with plenty of water, such as Dartmoor in Devon, the tundra of Alaska, the pampas in Argentina and the steppes of Mongolia.

From the beginning, Long made indoor works parallel with the outdoor ones, from driftwood or quarry stones or mud using his hands or feet on the floor or walls. For him they have different effects: real stones in a gallery have their own presence as they directly affect the senses of the viewers in public time and place; while it is the imagination that is fed through the ‘second-hand’ medium of photos, texts and maps.

Long has exhibited widely since his first solo show at the Konrad Fischer Gallery in Düsseldorf in 1968. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1989, and in 1990 became a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. He has recently been the subject of two major retrospectives, including one at London’s Tate Britain in 2009, which featured works from Long’s A straight hundred mile walk in Australia.

Read more about Richard Long’s 1977 Kaldor project.

See also Richard Long website.