related artist
related exhibition

Sperone Westwater is pleased to announce an exhibition of new work by Richard Long. The artist’s thirteenth solo exhibition at the gallery will consist of numerous mud works on American Douglas-fir plywood, as well as a winding plywood path which takes its cue from earlier stone sculptures created in both the landscape and indoors.

Richard Long created his first walking piece in 1967, which he described as “a straight line in a grass field, which was also my own path, going ‘nowhere’.” It was a radical redefinition of the boundaries of sculpture, which in turn paved the way for future works taking nature as both their subject and their medium. Since then, Long has manipulated, dispersed, and relocated such elemental materials as mud, dust, water and stones, in places as varied as Lapland and the Sahara. But while he is best known for his landscape works, these outdoor pieces are inherently related to the mud works and sculptures he creates specifically for indoor exhibition.

Fashioned from local materials (the works in this exhibition will be created exclusively from North American wood and earth), the free and gestural mud works suggest the spontaneity of their own creation. However, the strict structural principles that govern them serve to echo their carefully-ordered outdoor counterparts. As Paul Moorhouse writes in his recent essay on the artist, “A mud work by Long is a constructed thing: its cumulative handmarks echoing the individual steps in a walk or the separate stones that comprise a sculpture made in a landscape.” But perhaps it is Long himself who describes the relationship between outdoor and indoor works best:

They are made by the same artist, but in very different circumstances. My landscape works do come first, and inform the works I make in galleries. But a photo of a distant and perhaps vanished sculpture is complementary to a sculpture in a gallery. For me, it’s not either/or, it’s both. I would not want my art to be in a recording or documentary form, which is by definition “second hand”. I like the idea that I can show you something “here and now” as well as something from another time or place.

Born in 1945 in Bristol, England, Richard Long studied at West of England College of Art and at St. Martin's School of Art, London. He currently lives and works in Bristol. Since his first one-person exhibition at Konrad Fischer, Dusseldorf in 1968, Long has had numerous solo exhibitions, and has participated in many international exhibitions including Documenta V and VII. The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum organized a major retrospective of his work in 1986 and he was awarded the Turner Prize in 1989. Recent important exhibitions were organized by the Musée d'art moderne de la ville de Paris (1993), the Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo (1996), the Museo di Arte, Trento, Italy (2000), the Museu Serralves, Portugal (2001), and Tate St. Ives, Cornwall (2002). This summer, an installation entitled White Light Crescent and two large text works were featured at the Royal Academy, London. For more information, as well as photographic images, please contact Katharine Smyth at Sperone Westwater at (212) 999-7337, or info@speronewestwater.com.