Richard Long, Dragon Circle, 2010, Black slate and limestone, 400 cm in diameter.

Richard Long, Untitled, 2010, White China clay on wood, 9.8 x 44 cm.

Richard Long, Text translated from West East Line Walk , 2010, Acrylic on wall, 230 x 237 cm.

Richard Long, Untitled, 2010, Yangtze River mud on wood, 38.6 x 38.6 x 23 cm.

James Cohan Gallery Shanghai
1/F Building 1, No.1 Lane
170 Yue Yang Road
(86) 21.54.66.0825
Shanghai
Richard Long: A Thousand Stones
September 10-November 7, 2010

Central to the internationally renowned British artist Richard Long’s work is the activity of walking. Since the mid-1960s, Long has made countless walks throughout the world, in such places as the Sahara Desert, Australia, Iceland, and near his home in Bristol, England. Most recently, during the artist’s first trip to China, Long made works in Yunnan and Sichuan provinces, one of which is the source and inspiration for the title of his exhibition. The notion of walking as a form of sculpture was considered a radical idea when the artist, at age 22, made a work, titled A Line Made by Walking (1967) and gave new meaning to an activity as old as man himself, states Nicholas Serota, director of Tate Britain in London: “nothing in the history of art quite prepared us for the originality of his actions.” Sculpture, as Long has suggested, could be about place and time as well as material and form.

James Cohan Gallery Shanghai presents Long's first solo exhibition in China. Considered one of the most influential artists of his generation (b. 1945), Long’s works have extended the possibilities of sculpture beyond traditional materials and methods. In this exhibition of new works Long will also use materials indigenous to mainland China, such as stone and clay, and will feature sculpture, fingerprinted objects, a wall work made of colored clay, photographs, and text works.

The walks bring together physical endurance and principles of measurement, action, and idea. From these walks emerge ideas and materials for Long’s work. His sculptures and wall works commonly take the form of geometric shapes — circles, lines, ellipses, and spirals — using the raw materials of a place. Their simplicity and universal forms reflect the artist’s primary engagement with the landscapes of the world. Like the creative process as well as the walk, the circularity is paramount. Circles are timeless, universal; stones are common, practical, and exist almost everywhere. “I am interested in the emotional power of simple images,” Long has stated. Also for this exhibition, the artist will make a new wall-text work in Chinese, West East Line Walk. These text works are records of Long’s walks, using observations, narrative facts, and fragmentary thoughts. Like other text works by the artist they are perhaps the most conceptual, but can also become highly visceral in how they bring the simplicity of words and ideas into our minds for our imagination.

Richard Long was born in Bristol in 1945 where he continues to live and work. He studied at the West of England College of Art, before going to St Martin’s School of Art and Design, London, in 1966. Long has exhibited extensively at many major museums and institutions around the world, such as 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 Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain, Nice, France (2008). In 2009, Tate Britain held Richard Long: Heaven and Earth a major survey of Richard Long’s work. Long represented Britain in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1976 and was awarded the Turner Prize in 1989. In 1990 he became a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. And he 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 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.

Richard Long, Cold Stones, A Fourteen Day Walk In The Sierra Nevada, Spain, 2009, Gelatin silver print, 111.5 x 82 cm.

Richard Long, A Line in Scotland, 1981, © Copyright the artist.

Richard Long, Berlin Circle, 1996, © the Artist, Photo © Alexey Moskvin.

Richard Long, A Line in the Himalayas, 1975, © Copyright the artist.

Richard Long, A Line Made by Walking, 1967.

Tate Britain
Millbank
London
+44 20 7887 8888
Level 2
Richard Long:
Heaven and Earth
June 3-September 6, 2009

Heaven and Earth, a major exhibition of the work of Richard Long, is his first survey in London for 18 years. The exhibition includes important works selected across four decades and will provide an opportunity to understand afresh Long’s radical rethinking of the relationship between art and landscape. Comprising around 80 works, Heaven and Earth includes sculptures, new large-scale wall works, and photographic and text works documenting walks around the world, from Dartmoor to Japan.

Richard Long first came to prominence in the late 1960s and is part of a generation of British artists who extended the possibilities of sculpture beyond traditional materials and methods. Long’s work is rooted in his deep affinity with nature, developed during solitary walks. Long revolutionised the definition of sculpture by using walking as a medium. These walks take him through rural areas in Britain, or as far a field as the plains of Canada, Mongolia and Bolivia. Long never makes significant alterations to the landscapes he passes through. Instead he adjusts the natural order of wilderness places, up-ending stones for example, or making simple, geometric shapes. His work explores relationships between time, distance, geography, measurement and movement.

Heaven and Earth reflects the distinctive themes and interests in his work; sculptures of stones, watery mud works, and photographic and text works which record walks in global locations, or from a local area of life-long interest like Dartmoor. Long presents his work in various forms, which include artists’ books and postcards, all of which are ascribed equal value. The exhibition will include key early works such as A Line Made by Walking, England 1967, made in a field where the artist walked back and forth until the flattened grass caught by the sunlight became visible as a line, a path going ‘nowhere’. Long then photographed this work, as he has continued to record similar works in the landscape.

Mostly working in the landscape, Richard Long sometimes brings materials into the gallery. Four of Long’s dramatic mud works, which represent the forces of speed, water, chance and gravity will be made directly on to the walls for the show.  The large central gallery of the exhibition will be devoted to six major stone sculptures. Norfolk Flint Circle 1990 is an eight metre sculpture consisting of a single layer of flints lying close together on the floor. In the gallery, as on his walks, Long lays the stones in simple geometric configurations such as circles, lines, and ellipses. The exhibition will also include early examples of remote stone sculptures such as the first stone circle made while walking in the Andes in 1972.

Richard Long was born in Bristol in 1945 where he continues to live and work. Long has exhibited widely since his first solo show at the Konrad Fischer Gallery in Düsseldorf in 1968. He represented Britain in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale in 1976 and was awarded the Turner Prize in 1989.  In 1990 he became a Chevalier dans l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. Heaven and Earth is curated by Clarrie Wallis, Curator of Contemporary Art, Tate Britain, assisted by Helen Little, Assistant Curator, Tate Britain. A fully illustrated publication produced by Tate Publishing will accompany the exhibition and will include previously unseen works.

Richard Long, Dusty Boots Line, 1988.

Richard Long, A Coast to Coast Walk Across Ireland, 2006, Photograph, © Richard Long.

Richard Long, Untitled, 2007, Driftwood , Approx 91 x 15 x 2.5 cm, © Richard Long.

Richard Long, Flash Flood, 2004, Colour photograph with text, 84.5 x 129 cm, © Richard Long.

Richard Long, Parnassus Line Along a Six Day Walk, Greece, 2002, Photograph and text, © Richard Long.

Richard Long, A Stone Line before a Blizzard, A Fifteen Day Walk into National Forest, California, Winter, 2000,
Photograph and text, © Richard Long.

Richard Long, Five Ways (Diptych), 2006, Photograph, each 87 x 129 x 4 cm, © Richard Long.

Richard Long, Five Ways (Diptych), 2006, Photograph, each 87 x 129 x 4 cm, © Richard Long.

Haunch of Venison
Heidestrasse 46
+49 (0)30 39 74 39 63
Berlin
Richard Long
June 14-
September 6, 2008

British artist Richard Long, widely recognised as one of the most important artists to have emerged since the 1960s and a pioneer of Land and Conceptual art, is to present his first solo exhibition in the German capital this summer at Haunch of Venison Berlin.

Walking in the landscape has remained the basis of Long's subsequent practice but over the past 40 years he has extended his concerns to encompass photographic and text-based work, sculptures made in stone and wood, small-scale works using handprints and fingerprints on paper and driftwood, and monumental wall drawings made using mud and china clay. His works articulate ideas about time and space, relativity, natural forces and human experience.

Two large semi-circular works — a sculpture in local stone on the floor and a drawing in River Avon mud on the wall - will form the basis of the Berlin show, establishing a dynamic correspondence across the gallery space. On the gallery mezzanine Long will show a selection of new driftwood works and a new group of prints based on one of the artist's signatory motifs, his own handprint. A group of recent photographic works relating to walks made in California, Scotland, Greece and South Africa will also be exhibited.

Richard Long's work is characterized by simplicity, precision and economy, yet explores conceptually complex themes and ideas. While a student in the '60s in London, Long began to make works based on simple yet precise walks made in the landscape, and in doing so initiated a major development in post-war art.

Long's innovative, beautiful and influential work has been exhibited in many major international museums and is held in important collections worldwide, including the Hamburger Bahnhof Museum Fur Gegenwart, Berlin, where his huge cut slate Berlin Circle (1996) is currently on display.

Richard Long: Selected Statements and Interviews, which gathers together seminal texts and interviews by the artist from 1971-2006 is published by Haunch of Venison.

Richard Long (born June 2, 1945) is one of the best known British land artists. His piece Delabole Slate Circle, acquired from the Tate Modern in 1997, is a central piece in Bristol's main Museum and Art Gallery.

Long was born in Camborne, and studied art there at the West of England College of Art from 1962 to 1965, and graduated from St Martin's School of Art in London in 1968. Several of his works are based around walks that he has made, and as well as land-based natural sculpture, he uses the mediums of photography, text and maps of the landscape he has walked over. In his work, often cited as a response to the environments he walked in, sometimes the landscape would be deliberately changed in some way, as in A Line Made by Walking (1967), and sometimes sculptures were made in the landscape from rocks or similar found materials and then photographed. Other pieces consist of photographs or maps of unaltered landscapes accompanied by texts detailing the location and time of the walk it indicates.

A permanent installation is on view in the main lobby of Hearst Tower (New York City) entitled Riverlines. Completed during the summer of 2006 and the biggest wall work he had ever made — about 35 x 50 feet.

Long is the only artist to be shortlisted for the Turner Prize four times. He was nominated in 1984, 1987, 1988 and he won the award in 1989 for White Water Line.

Richard Long, Untitled, 2007, Driftwood , Approx 81 x 5 x 8 cm, © Richard Long.

Richard Long, Installation view, Haunch of Venison Berlin, 2008, © Richard Long.