Preview: Richard Long, Arnolfini

Richard Long’s Time and Space is the Arnolfini’s blockbuster exhibition of 2015. The show is a significant part of the Bristol 2015 – European Green Capital arts, craft and exhibitions programme and is a major coup for the Arnolfini. Long is one of the most acclaimed land and conceptual artists of the past 40 years, nationally and internationally, and this solo exhibition is his first in Bristol since 2000.

Time and Space will explore how Long’s work and modus operandi developed over his lengthy career and how it was an is inextricably linked to and created from the landscape, whether it is an interior piece located in an gallery or a vast land piece.

A Circle In Antarctica. Courtesy the artist

Long was born in Bristol in 1945 and studied at the West of England College of Art. After he graduated in 1965 he attended the world-famous St Martin’s School of Art where he studied under the English abstract sculptor Anthony Caro. The late Sixties saw the emergence of ‘land art’ and it is this aesthetic form with which Long is most associated.

‘Land’ or ‘Earth’ art was born out of the anarchic, aiming to be egalitarian and challenging the preconceptions of viewer, artist and buyer, conceptual and modernist art movements. It is an artistic genre where landscape and the work of art are irrevocably entwined.

Not only is the art form a part of the landscape: it is also created from that which makes the landscape, earth, wood, soil, stone, and water combined with non-natural materials such as metal and concrete. The ethos behind land art is that is was a clear rejection of the manufactured, the artificial and the commercialisation of art which was an inevitable result of art being displayed in, and artists tied to, galleries.

Richard Long came to the attention of the art cognoscenti when he showed his first major piece at the Earth Art exhibition at Cornell University in New York in 1969. However his work began to have a significant impact on the international contemporary art scene in the 1970s. The work he was making at this time took walks through countries such as Bolivia, Canada and Mongolia as a starting point for impressive sculptures.

Walks and walking remain an integral element of Long’s work and creative process to this day. His work does not intervene in and alter the landscape significantly, rather he leaves traces of his passing through by perhaps upending a rock, creating a stone circle or simply photographing the route made across grass he tracks through. Sometimes Long’s walks follow a definite and defined route, sometimes they are more organic and capricious, much the same as his gallery based work.

His breakthrough piece A Line Made by Walking was created when he walked across a patch of grass in straight line repeatedly and photographed the result in monochrome. His new landscape piece in Bristol, Boyhood Line, repeats this process across the Downs, where he marks the tracks of well worn, though unofficial and unmapped, paths worn by the general public as they cross the grass.

Richard Long pieces have been displayed in numerous galleries across the world including Tate Modern, Tate Liverpool, the Guggenheim, Bilbao, and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. Whilst the idea of a land artist exhibiting in a gallery may seem like the antithesis of the land art philosophy in Long’s case it works spectacularly well. He genuinely brings nature inside not just the gallery but also the accepted norms of gallery shows and art shown in galleries.

River Avon Mud Crescent

Using mud as ‘paint’ often applied using his hands Long creates monumental paintings, composed of geometric circles and lines which seem to ebb and flow off the canvas, wall or floor. His sculptures using irregularly shaped stones, such as South Bank Circle, which is a circle of jagged, dark stone, irregular yet regular and inciting questioning whilst being unexpectedly visually compelling. Long will also be showing several new gallery pieces in TIME AND SPACE and faithful recreations of older work created throughout his career.

Richard Long. Photograph by James Wainman. Courtesy the Lisson Gallery

Time and Space opens at the Arnolfini on July 31. For more information see www.arnolfini.org.uk