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RICHARD LONG - 'IN CONVERSATION'
Tuesday 20 October 2015
Richard Long has been in the vanguard of Conceptual, Minimal and Land art in Britain since he created A Line Made by Walking in 1967, while still a student. A photograph of the path left by his feet in the grass, a fixed line of movement, established a precedent that art could be a journey. Through this medium of walking, time, space and distance became new subjects for his art. From that time he expanded his walks to wilderness regions all over the world. He mediates his experience of these places, from mountains through to deserts, shorelines, grasslands, rivers and snowscapes, according to archetypal geometric marks and shapes, made by his footsteps alone or gathered from the materials of the place. These walks and temporary works, where measurements of time and distance, place names and phenomena are vocabulary for both original ideas and powerful, condensed narratives.
Richard Long was born in Bristol, UK in 1945, where he continues to live and work. He studied at West of England College of Art, Bristol (1962-65), then St Martin’s School of Art, London (1966-68). In 1969, Long was included in a seminal exhibition of Minimalist and Conceptual works entitled, When Attitude Becomes Form, at the Kunsthalle, Bern, for which he made A Walk in the Alps that was documented by this first text work. After 1969, Long began making journeys and sculptures in wilderness places all around the world, documenting his walks with photographs, maps and text works. In the 1980s Long began making new types of mud works using handprint applied directly to the wall. He also continued to make large sculptures of lines and circles from slate, driftwood, footprints or stone often sourced from quarries near the exhibition sites.
- Genre
- art