Richard Long. COLD STONES

COLD STONES REVIEWS RICHARD LONG’S ICONIC OEUVRE AND UNVEILS HIS LATEST CREATIONS

The CAC Málaga is pleased to present COLD STONES by Richard Long, an exhibition curated by Fernando Francés. The show offers a survey of Long’s distinguished career in a selection of thirty-odd works—sculptures, textworks, photographs, drawings on wood and an enormous mud mural—as well as new site-specific pieces conceived expressly for this venue. Richard Long finds inspiration for his work in nature and the relationship between human beings and their environment. For this artist, walking is art, and the ideas for his interventions come from the landscapes he traverses on foot. His textworks, maps, photographs and even sound recordings are a way of documenting his passage through these settings. Long’s materials are the elements of nature: water, mud, soil, bits of wood he collects, feathers, dry leaves and stones. This exhibition is generously supported by the British Council and Tino Natural Stone.

When explaining his work, on more than one occasion the artist has stated, “I like the simplicity of walking, the simplicity of stones.” Richard Long (b. Bristol, 1945) is one of the most prominent members of a generation of artists who revolutionised the art world in the 1970s. Combining elements of Arte Povera, minimalism and conceptual art, he has been in the vanguard of Land Art since 1967, when he created A Line Made by Walking while still a student. Through his work, he attempts to bring part of nature into the exhibition hall and visibilise human relationships with the environment, striving to refute the notion of man’s dominion over nature. To this end, in the course of his walks he makes modifications that alter the landscape. These transformations are usually short-lived and soon disappear under the inexorable effects of erosion and the passage of time. The photographs he takes, and even his sound recordings, testify to his transitory presence in a particular place. The textworks that complement his pieces also define Long’s relationship with space, in which the measurements of time and distance and place names are infused with poetic significance for him. His drawings on wood and his sculptures reaffirm his connection to the land.

For Fernando Francés, director of the CAC Málaga, “Of the many relationships that define the human condition, one of the most fundamental is the bond between the individual and his/her environment. A simple way to relate to the world around us, specifically to nature, is by walking, travelling alone and on foot across the different landscapes this planet has to offer. Walking is universal. Walking represents independence and freedom. And walking is precisely what Richard Long’s art is all about: walking in nature, but as an art form that lets him articulate ideas about time and space, space understood as distance. His work connects with the oldest vestiges of humanity’s relationship with nature, evoking a time when we had a more spiritual bond to the earth, closer to the attitude of African animists.”

The artist has spent 40 years roaming the earth, from the United Kingdom and Canada to Mongolia and Bolivia, trekking across deserts, plains and snow-capped mountains and following river courses through rugged terrain. Long sees the act of walking as art, and in the course of these walks he finds inspiration for different actions, from collecting stones and other materials from a certain place and using them to create an intervention inside an exhibition hall to making a sculpture out of a geographical feature. Later, these ephemeral actions are documented in photographs or textworks. COLD STONES features selected pieces that are representative of the artist’s long career, from sculptures and photographs of his travels in different places (including Spain) to drawings, textworks and a large mud mural. Long prefers to interact with autochthonous materials, which is why he selected stones from Andalusia, specifically the Macael quarries in Almería, to create a sculpture included in this show.

Long’s oeuvre is a travel journal that narrates his existence and life experiences. Physical exertion is his way of connecting with nature. With regard to his mud murals, since the 1980s Long has frequently employed this material in his work, using his own mud-coated hands to apply it directly to the wall and create circular or spiral forms which, as the force of gravity works on the watery mixture, give rise to an original mural composition. The artist seeks simplicity in the forms of his drawings and murals. Long tries to strike up a “dialogue” with nature and forge a spiritual bond with the earth, reviving and materialising the idea that nature has always been present in artistic activity.

Richard Long was born in Bristol in 1945. He studied at Saint Martín’s School of Art in London, where his work A Line Made by Walking (1967), a trail worn into the grass by walking back and forth repeatedly in a straight line, marked the beginning of a long and productive career. Over the years, he has made art by exploring the landscapes of every inhabited continent on foot and fashioning sculptures in the places he discovered along the way. His work is conveyed through photographs, textworks, books and exhibitions. In 1976 he represented Great Britain at the 39th Venice Biennale; in 1995 he was made a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres by the French Ministry of Culture; in 2001 he was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts; in 2009 he was awarded Japan’s Praemium Imperiale in the field of sculpture; and in 2013 he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire.

His work is found in the permanent collections of some of the world’s most important museums, including the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, the Museum of Modern Art in New York, Tate Britain in London, the Guggenheim Museum, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the E. Hoffmann Collection in Basel.

Long has been the subject of several major retrospectives in the course of his career, most notably at the Guggenheim Museum in New York (1986), Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1993), Philadelphia Museum of Art (1994), National Museum of Art in Kyoto (1996), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2006), Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art in Edinburgh (2007), Tate Britain in London (2009), Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin (2010) and Arnolfini in Bristol (2015). Since 1968, his work has been featured in more than 250 solo exhibitions round the world.