Richard Long

Sperone Westwater is pleased to announce Richard Long’s 17th exhibition with the gallery since his first in 1976. A new, monumental mud work, FULL MOON, 2025, will be presented alongside sculptures, photographs, and text-based works spanning more than three decades.

In FULL MOON, human and cosmic forces combine in a singular image. Long takes a direct and improvisational approach, leveraging gravity and his own bodily force when applying terra cotta directly onto the wall with his hand. Forging new connections between sculpture and nature, the human instinct for mark-making is continually evident in Long’s art.

Long began his practice of walking as a student in Bristol in the 1960s, making subtle sculptures in the landscape. The spirit of this creative act endures in Long’s art as he continues celebrating the natural world and the individual’s place within it. The traces of Long’s walks are evidenced in text-based works, photographs, and sculptures made along the way from materials of each place.

Each walk is a singular experience defined by its distance, duration, and route. Measuring his movement with standard units such as miles and days, Long also “plays with time,” defining his walks by any number of formal parameters. His text work, Highland Time, 2002, reads: “a winter walk of seventeen dreams/ crossing Creag Dhubh Cairn at a midday/ from a blizzard to a full moon rising/ while the Earth travels 5,740,000 miles in its orbit” Long situates his walks within our planet’s vast and continuous celestial movements.                                                                                                 

Long’s sculptural interventions, such as a line of stones placed on a path in Pacific Crest Trail Stones (Along a 20 Day Walk in the Sierra Nevada California) (2005), are inspired by materials characteristic of the terrain. Often formed into universal symbols like circles, crosses and spirals, these works also transcend language and specificity of place. As he notes, “Stones are what the world is made of, so I have the freedom to make art anywhere my walking takes me.” Two new stone sculptures will be created in the gallery for the exhibition: one made of slate shingles and the other from flint from Norfolk, England.

Richard Long was born in 1945 in Bristol, England, where he currently lives and works. He studied at the West of England College of Art and St. Martin’s School of Art, London. Since his first solo exhibition in 1968, he has had retrospectives at The Guggenheim, New York (1986); Hayward Gallery, London (1991); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2007); and Tate Britain, London (2009). Solo museum shows include Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris (1993), Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo (1996); Museu Serralves, Portugal (2001); Tate St. Ives, Cornwall (2002); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2006); Musée d’art moderne et d’art contemporain de Nice (2008); “ARTIST ROOMS” organized by the National Galleries of Scotland and Tate, which traveled to The Hepworth Wakefield, England, among other venues (2012-20); and Arnolfini, Bristol (2015). The National Gallery, London, commissioned Long to create a large-scale work, Mud Sun, in honor of the institution’s bicentennial; the work was unveiled in spring 2025 and will be on permanent display. Long was awarded the Turner Prize in 1989, the Praemium Imperiale Art Award from Japan in 2009 and the Whitechapel Art Icon Award in 2015. The artist had his first solo show at Sperone Westwater in 1976, where he exhibits regularly (1978, 1980, 1981, 1982, 1984, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1994, 1997, 2000, 2004, 2011, 2015 and 2020)