Richard Long
TIME AND SPACE
31 July–15 November 2015
Preview: Thursday 30 July, 5:30pm
Offsite project: Boyhood Line, on The Downs, Bristol
20 June–15 November 2015
Arnolfini
16 Narrow Quay
Bristol, BS1 4QA
This summer, Arnolfini presents TIME AND SPACE, a major new exhibition by Richard Long. The project looks particularly at Bristol and the South West of England, an area area where Long grew up and still lives, as the start and end point for many of his early walks and text works. The exhibition focuses on the artist’s personal relationship to place and local materials, and how the ideas and language developed through his early career were key in the development of ideas that the artist now realises across the world.
Richard Long has created many works that engage with the landscape, investigating nature and his experience within it. Like other artists associated with the Conceptual and Minimal Art movements of the mid-sixties, he emphasises the process of perception and ideas in art, while his works create moments of beauty and poetry inside and outside of gallery spaces. Walking is central to Long’s work as a way of perceiving and recording landscape, and as a medium has enabled him to articulate ideas about time and space. He seeks a freedom of movement and expression, and a balance with the natural world though a physical and personal engagement with the land, working with nature to reflect its impermanence and the changing processes of time.
Richard Long’s beguilingly simple works use raw materials such as stones and driftwood, found along the way. These works are often simple interventions, marks of passage. Often these works leave little or no trace and are documented through photographs or text works that record his ideas, observations and experiences.
“They are a sort of simple celebration of the place, like its stones, or the horizon, or the mist, and of me being there, at that particular time, possibly never to pass that way again. I sometimes think of these works as songs. I have said that a sculpture can be as far as the eye can see, meaning the stones can be aligned to a feature on the horizon, for example, or a passing cloud, at that moment, in relation to the viewer.”
- Richard Long, 2014
TIME AND SPACE includes sculpture, drawing, photography and text works that date from 1967 to the present. The exhibition features a number of important early works and will include two major new works: a large sculpture made from Cornish slate and a wall work made with mud from the River Avon. Also included will be a selection of new mud fingerprint drawings on driftwood collected by the artist, as well as a selection of photo works and text works.
Accompanying the gallery exhibition is a new offsite commission on The Downs, an area of particular significance to the artist and the site of several key early works. Boyhood Line, 2015, is made from white limestone and centres on a footpath, a “desire line” which has been made over many months by the footprints of people walking across The Downs, instinctively following the same route and establishing an unplanned path through the grass.
Richard Long is considered to be among the most important artists of his generation. In 1969, his work was included in the seminal exhibition When Attitudes Become Form at the Kunsthalle Bern, for which he presented his first text work documenting a walk made in the Alps. He won the Turner prize in 1989, and represented Great Britain at the 37th Venice Biennale in 1976. He was awarded Japan’s Praemium Imperiale in the field of sculpture in 2009, and was made a CBE in 2013. He has made artworks in all five continents and has had over 250 solo exhibitions to date.
Publication
A new book will be published to accompany the project, which focuses on the artist’s work from recent years. Including texts by Nicholas Logsdail, Teresa Gleadowe, Richard Long and Robert Macfarlane, this new publication offers an opportunity to consider how Long’s work is situated today, and marks an important moment to celebrate a career that has spanned six decades and a lifetime’s engagement with landscape through journeys made around the world.
Bristol 2015 European Green Capital
TIME AND SPACE is one of six arts projects funded by the Arts Council England Exceptional Fund as part of Bristol’s year as European Green Capital, to help make sustainable living accessible. The Bristol 2015 arts and culture projects are being delivered by national portfolio organisation, the Bristol Cultural Development Partnership (BDCP), and will play a central part in helping people see sustainability in a new light.
Publication launch
Thursday 17 September, 6pm
In conversation with Richard Long
Saturday 31 October, 11:30am
Part of the Art Weekender: Bristol and Bath
Events programme
Events to compliment the exhibition will include talks, screenings, workshops, performances and family activity for all ages. Read more here.
