Richard Long (artist) - Work

Work

Long made his international reputation during the 1970s, but already with sculptures made as the result of epic walks, these take him through rural and remote areas in Britain, or as far afield as the plains of Canada, Mongolia and Bolivia. He walks at different times for different reasons. At times, these are predetermined courses and concepts; yet equally, the idea of the walk may assert itself in an arbitrary circumstance. Guided by a great respect for nature and by the formal structure of basic shapes, Long never makes significant alterations to the landscapes he passes through. Instead he marks the ground or adjusts the natural features of a place by up-ending stones for example, or making simple traces. He usually works in the landscape but sometimes uses natural materials in the gallery. Different modes of presentation, sometimes combined, were used to bring his experience of nature back into the museum or gallery. From 1981, Long also alluded to the terms of painting by applying mud in a very liquid state by hand to a wall in similar configurations, establishing a dialogue between the primal gesture of the hand-print and the formal elegance of its display. He stressed that the meaning of his work lay in the visibility of his actions rather than in the representation of a particular landscape. 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. In 2012 the artist was on view at the exhibition "Ends of the Earth: Land Art bis 1974" with the conceptual and rarely shown work entitled A Walking Line in the Berner Oberland.