Press Pack Richard Long 533 West 26 St New York NY 10001 291 Grand St New York NY 10002 212 714 9500 jamescohan.com
Richard Long Considered one of the most influential artists of his generation, Richard Long s works have extended the possibilities of sculpture beyond traditional materials and methods. Central to Long s work is the activity of walking. Since the mid-1960s he has taken countless walks throughout the world, in such places as the Sahara Desert, Australia, Iceland and near his home in Bristol, United Kingdom. The walks bring together physical endurance and principles of order, action and idea. From these walks emerge the idea and material for his works. Long s sculptures commonly take the form of geometric shapes circles, lines, ellipses, and spirals and are often composed of minerals native either to their location or to the British countryside Long has traveled by foot. He similarly sources mud and earth from his expeditions for use in performative paintings done on canvas or directly onto the wall. Richard Long was born in 1945 in Bristol, United Kingdom and studied at the West of England College of Art before continuing on to the St. Martin s School of Art and Design, London in 1966. Long represented Britain in the British Pavilion at the 1976 Venice Biennale and was awarded the Turner Prize in 1989. Long s work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at major international museums and institutions, including the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco; Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, Scotland; Musée d Art Moderne et d Art Contemporain, Nice, France; and the Tate Modern, London, United Kingdom. In 1990 he became a Chevalier dans l Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French government and was awarded the highest international distinction for achievement in the arts, the Praemium Imperiale Prize for Sculpture in 2009. Long s work is included in many prestigious public and private collections worldwide, including the Tate, London, United Kingdom; the Museum of Modern Art, New York; National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, Canada; and the Musée d Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, France. Richard Long lives and works in Bristol, United Kingdom. 533 West 26 St New York NY 10001 291 Grand St New York NY 10002 212 714 9500 jamescohan.com
533 West 26 St New York NY 10001 291 Grand St New York NY 10002 212 714 9500 jamescohan.com Cole, Ina, Ideas Can Last Forever: A Conversation with Richard Long, June 2016
533 West 26 St New York NY 10001 291 Grand St New York NY 10002 212 714 9500 jamescohan.com
533 West 26 St New York NY 10001 291 Grand St New York NY 10002 212 714 9500 jamescohan.com
533 West 26 St New York NY 10001 291 Grand St New York NY 10002 212 714 9500 jamescohan.com
533 West 26 St New York NY 10001 291 Grand St New York NY 10002 212 714 9500 jamescohan.com
533 West 26 St New York NY 10001 291 Grand St New York NY 10002 212 714 9500 jamescohan.com
533 West 26 St New York NY 10001 291 Grand St New York NY 10002 212 714 9500 jamescohan.com
533 West 26 St New York NY 10001 291 Grand St New York NY 10002 212 714 9500 jamescohan.com
Kennedy, Maev Richard Long goes for a walk through boyhood haunts with latest sculpture, The Guardian, June 19, 2015 Richard Long goes for a walk through boyhood haunts with latest sculpture Boyhood Line follows informal path on Bristol Downs and marks return to scene of early works by the artist, who is subject of major solo show at Arnolfini Gallery The Turner prize-winning artist Richard Long has made works of art in some of the most inaccessible places on earth including Antarctica, Mongolia, the Atlas mountains in Morocco, and the Sahara desert. Richard Long next to Boyhood Line, which he thinks may end up in people s rockeries. This is not my natural habitat, this semi-urbanised parkland, he said, looking slightly bemused and even with a hint of disapproval at the sun shining on the daisies and buttercups of the Bristol Downs, with cars rumbling past, dog walkers on the march, and a circus student attaching a tightrope between two trees. As he spoke an excited pug dog set itself the challenge of leaping backwards and forwards across his latest creation, Boyhood Line, a stripe of brilliant white limestone in the lush grass. What is it? a middle-aged walker stopped to demand. It s a sculpture, Long explained, made by me, actually. Oh, I thought it might have been something to mark the path, the man said and strode on, quite incurious. Those stumbling across the site of the work commissioned by the Arnolfini Gallery in Bristol, where a major exhibition of Long s work opens in July, may be ignorant of his work, but the artist himself is standing on very familiar turf. 533 West 26 St New York NY 10001 291 Grand St New York NY 10002 212 714 9500 jamescohan.com
We had our bicycles and we were just turned loose all day. We used to climb trees and track courting couples, and dig animal traps on the towpath and cover them up with grass to disguise them, he recalled. We never caught anything, but my friend did fall out of a tree and break his arm, so that was exciting. Several early pieces were made within a hundred metres of the new work, including the 1964 A Snowball Track included in the exhibition in the form of his beautiful photographs a muddy snail trail left by rolling a snowball through a thin covering of snow. Long still uses the silty mud from the Avon in many works, including some new pieces he will be creating in the gallery. Richard Long creating a work last year for the Hertfordshire estate of Henry Moore. Photograph: Graeme Robertson I used to think it was the most beautiful mud in the world, he said, but now I think the mud I used in South America, which came washing down from the Amazon, may be more beautiful so chocolatey. He has covered thousands of miles making work described as walking in landscape. Most have a formal geometric elegance, documented in equally elegant photographs and text panels. However, Boyhood Line follows an informal path worn in the turf by walkers, so it meanders, swerves and at one point humps up to cover a patch of bumpy ground. There is no significance in its length either: the gallery sourced him nearly 11 tonnes of blindingly white limestone from a quarry in north Wales, and he laid his track until the stone ran out. Many of Long s pieces are fragile and fleeting: a stripe of un-mown grass in an otherwise close cropped lawn at the Henry Moore foundation, a misty circle in Scotland that lasted only until the day warmed up, a stripe of green grass left by plucking daisies, or paintings in wet mud that dry out and crumble. 533 West 26 St New York NY 10001 291 Grand St New York NY 10002 212 714 9500 jamescohan.com
However, the gleaming stones are very solid. The piece is intended to remain in place until the autumn, but neither gallery nor artist is quite sure what happens then: should the stones be left to the curious dogs and the boots of walkers, or gathered up? Maybe people will have taken it all away by then, Long said. This could all end up as rockeries. 533 West 26 St New York NY 10001 291 Grand St New York NY 10002 212 714 9500 jamescohan.com
Forrest, Nicholas, Richard Long Named 2015 Whitechapel Art Icon, Artinfo, January 18, 2015 Richard Long Named 2015 Whitechapel Art Icon Portrait of Richard Long, Photo James Wainman, Courtesy of Lisson Gallery London s Whitechapel Gallery has announced that it will honour renowned British sculptor, photographer, and painter Richard Long as the Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon, which celebrates the lifetime achievements of one of our greatest artists. The first recipient of the award was Howard Hodgkin in 2014. Long, the 2015 Art Icon, will be presented with the award, which is supported by the The Swarovski Foundation at a special gala dinner hosted by Whitechapel Gallery Director Iwona Blazwick OBE on March 19, 2015. Long was born in Bristol, UK in 1945, where he continues to live and work. He has been at the forefront of conceptual art in Britain since he created A Line Made by Walking (1967), a photograph of the path left by his feet in the grass. Long describes his work as Art made by walking in landscapes; Photographs of sculptures made along the way; Walks made into textworks. His first major solo exhibition, which took place at the Whitechapel gallery in 1971, exhibition caused shockwaves when it was unveiled to the British public. Whitechapel Gallery Director, Iwona Blazwick OBE, said: Richard Long revolutionised installation art, fusing together performance, landscape, language and photography. His 1971 exhibition at the Whitechapel Gallery was radical, filling the space with a huge cross made of pine needles. He is the Whitechapel Gallery Art Icon because he is a pioneer. At a time when concern about the environment is critical and live art, sculpture and performance poetry is seeing a huge resurgence, Richard Long has never been more important. He is a revelation and inspiration to successive generations of artists. 533 West 26 St New York NY 10001 291 Grand St New York NY 10002 212 714 9500 jamescohan.com
Wright, Karen, In the Studio: Richard Long, sculptor, The Independent, July 21, 2012 In the Studio: Richard Long, sculptor By Karen Wright Naturally gifted: Richard Long at the Hepworth gallery "Not twigs, sticks!" Richard Long corrects me. His height 6ft 4ins and his lowering, bushy eyebrows make him a little intimidating. We are standing by Somerset Willow Line, a work from 1980 recreated here in the Hepworth Museum, Wakefield. Not a promising start to a conversation. I had requested to see the artist in his studio, and now we are standing here, because, as Long puts it, "my work is my studio". Settling on a wooden bench facing the work, he tells me that he first used sticks in 1968, when he had his debut show in the Düsseldorf gallery of the prescient Kaspar Koenig, who also 533 West 26 St New York NY 10001 291 Grand St New York NY 10002 212 714 9500 jamescohan.com
launched the career of Gilbert and George, among many others. Long brought his materials to Germany from the Avon Gorge, "not knowing how it would look". "Koenig was great," he reminisces. "We were at a party in Krefeld the night before and then only got in at 2am, finished making the work at daybreak, and the gallery opened at 10am." Long was born in 1945 in Bristol, where he still lives and works. He was nominated for the Turner Prize in 1984, 1987, 1988 and 1989, when he won. He represented Great Britain at the 1976 Venice Biennale and Tate Britain gave him a one-man show in 2009. I ask, as it seems like a drawing in space, if the stick work refers to David Smith? "My work is analogous with many things; it could just as well be with Arte Povera or Minimalism." There also seems an affinity with Carl Andre in the way that Long's work connects the viewer to the ground. "Carl said, 'my work is place'. Mine is walking place to place," says Long. His work may refer to many things, but it is his unique way of using materials as basic and personal as walking or handprints in mud as his interventions with architecture or nature that makes him such a recognisable artist. Long lollops off to oversee the installation of A Day's Walk Across Dartmoor Following the Drift of the Clouds, a text work on a nearby wall. He says the idea to use the room came late in the day and he needed "a work that was a one-liner," adding, "It is a simple, classic work." He turns from the text work to a nearby photo work and says, "The cactus branches in the photo are not about the branches, but are embedded in the whole place. It is about a particular place I found. My work is place." 533 West 26 St New York NY 10001 291 Grand St New York NY 10002 212 714 9500 jamescohan.com
Dorment,. Richard, The Richard Long retropsective Heaven and Earth, at Tate Britain, exudes personality and mysery, The Telegraph, June 1, 2009 The Richard Long retrospective Heaven and Earth, at Tate Britain, exudes personality and mystery Two years ago the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art staged a retrospective of the work of British sculptor Richard Long that left me reeling. Selected and installed by the artist himself, the show struck a perfect balance between wall texts, photographs, three- dimensional sculptures, works on paper, and found objects. But what really made the experience different from any show of Long's art I'd any seen before was the prominence given to his mud pieces, the spectacularly tactile works in which he throws, sloshes, smears and slaps liquefied mud or china clay straight onto the gallery walls. What struck me so forcibly at Edinburgh was the visceral, adrenalin-pumping excitement of encountering so many of the mud pieces in one place. A new retrospective of Long's work opening today at Tate Britain is utterly different. The curator has shifted the focus away from works of art Long creates or assembles in the gallery to emphasise the long walks he has been making both this country and abroad since the Sixties. Because the viewer can only experience these journeys at second hand through words, maps and photographs, this aspect of Long's practice tends to appeal more to the mind than to the eye. Despite the presence in this show of a number of three-dimensional sculptures and mud pieces, the large number of photo and text pieces makes exceptional demands on the audience. Though the show takes so much concentration that it will require more than one visit to see properly, it serves to remind us that the ephemeral journeys on foot have always been at the heart of this remarkable artist's work. The history of art advances not when an artist creates something wholly original, but when the public accepts what he has done as a finished work of art. When JMW Turner exhibited a canvas consisting of two great arcs of black and white paint and nobody laughed when he called it Hannibal Crossing the Alps, landscape painting changed for ever. The same thing happened in 1967 when the 22-year-old Richard Long walked in a straight line through a field in the English countryside, photographed the newly trodden path, and then exhibited the photo as a finished work of art. He was asking his audience to make a trade-off: accept that to experience this work you have to use your imagination, and in return I will show you that sculpture can be made anywhere, out of any material, and using any physical action. What convinced those who first saw this work of its importance, I think, was Long's ability to imbue his actions with gravity. Other artists in the late Sixties were working directly with the land, but none did so with Long's humility, his respect for nature, or his lightness of touch. In A Line Made by Walking we can see exactly how the path was made, approximate the time it took to make it, and guess how long it will remain visible before it is obliterated by the elements. And yet it is also mysterious. It looks as though it appeared out of nowhere, with no footprints leading up to it or away from it, at once a sign of the artist's presence and of his absence. Long's earliest works are filled with silence and emptiness. In them, you find an unflinching compulsion to describe reality unmitigated by the artist's subjective responses to nature. Gradually, however, he added texts, and these in turn made his art more intimate, emotional and personal. 533 West 26 St New York NY 10001 291 Grand St New York NY 10002 212 714 9500 jamescohan.com
In a piece made in 1970, for example, he took stones from the shallows of a river bank in the Smoky Mountains of Tennessee to make an X-shaped sculpture under the clear running waters. In the lower right hand corner of the photograph documenting the action, he prints the words to Johnny Cash's I Walk the Line. Here he pays his respects to the culture of the American South, and also lets us know that the tune was running through his head as he worked. You can almost see him smiling as he did so, for that song could serve as the personal anthem for an artist who spends so much of his time walking lines. It is hard to convey the effect of Long's wall texts without reproducing their topography, scale, spacing and use of colour. Many consist of place names, nouns, and verbs sometimes connected by prepositions or conjunctions, sometimes not. Basically these are lists of things Long saw, heard, thought, ate, or encountered on each walk, but when he strings them together they have the rhythmic concision of Japanese haikus. One, from a 15 day walk he made in Oregon in 2001, begins "Moving by day/ Resting by night" and ends "The walk as A True Path/ Some False Moves". Reading it the first time, I saw it as another list of sights and events encountered on the walk. Now I'm not so sure. Long doesn't usually go in for metaphor but here he seems to equate the act of walking and sleeping, dreaming, counting and thinking with life itself. But the text and photo works are so demanding that they are best seen one at a time, not in a large show like this. So it was a relief to come to the breathtaking display of six three-dimensional stone sculptures laid out in one large gallery. Each is different. In one long rectangular piece, fragments of light grey slate are placed in such a way that each diagonal is matched by an opposing diagonal. The thrusts and counter- thrusts create a sense of contained energy which is ratcheted even higher by the interstices between each stone, so that none actually touches another. By contrast, a monumental circle of closely spaced iron-rich basalt exudes an atmosphere so dark and heavy it feels as though it might sink through the gallery floor. An elegant circle of upended shards of dark red slate points to the sky, lifting the spirits. And that brings me to the mud pieces, and the title of the show, Heaven and Earth. The theme of the union of earth and sky, body and soul, heart and mind runs throughout the exhibition, culminating in a mud piece made in two parts. There is a band near the ceiling in which Long has flung and rubbed china clay from Cornwall with his hands, fingers and arms in compact tightly worked sworls. And below this water line, he allows the force of gravity to let the overspill run in rivulets to the floor, so that the whole piece wonderfully evokes clouds, rain heavenly turbulence pouring down to the earth below. Long himself I mean a photo of the artist never appears in his work and yet walking through this show there isn't a moment when you aren't aware of his mind and his body at work just as it is difficult to look at Jackson Pollock's work and not picture the artist in the act of making one his drip paintings. Long is present everywhere, inside the landscape and outside it. By the time you'd reached the exit you've experienced his hardship and joy, you know his taste in music, what he has for dinner at the campsite, what he reads, and what he thinks about as he walks. There was that film a couple of year's ago called A Beautiful Mind. That's what we encounter here. 533 West 26 St New York NY 10001 291 Grand St New York NY 10002 212 714 9500 jamescohan.com