Richard Long

Driftwood Line (1977)

English sculptor, photographer and painter Richard Long was born in 1945 in Bristol. He studied at the West of England College of Art in Bristol before graduating from St. Martin's School of Art and Design in London. Richard Long is a landscape artist; for him, the landscape is at once the medium and subject of his work. He introduced the act of walking as an art form as early as 1967.
Long had his first solo exhibition at the Konrad Fischer Gallery in Düsseldorf in 1968, and just a year later was showing in Paris, Milan and New York. After 1969, Long created environmental works all around the world, documenting his walks with texts, maps and photographs. As Long began exhibiting more frequently, he was forced to realise different modes of presentation to bring his experience of nature back into the museum or gallery. In 1970, at the Dwan Gallery in New York, Long walked a spiral on the floor with boots muddied from the soil of England. In the 1980s, Long began making new types of mud works using handprints applied directly to the wall. He also constructed large lines and circles made of stones, slate, and sticks, often collected on his walks or, in later years, from locations near the exhibition sites.

In Driftwood Line 171 pieces of driftwood, gathered from a beach near the artist's house, are randomly arranged within a rectangular shape. The worn wood and its reference to the eternal rhythm of nature lends the work its still, meditative and poetic atmosphere. Long has exhibited extensively at museums and galleries internationally, recently holding solo exhibitions at Haunch of Venison, London and Berlin (2003, 2006, 2008), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, San Francisco (2006), Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2007) and at the Musee d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain, Nice, France (2008). The artist has won numerous awards and honours, including the Turner Prize, and his work features in many important public and private collections worldwide, including Tate, London, the Museum of Modern Art, New York, the National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa, and Musee d'Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Paris, among many others. He has been awarded the highest international distinction for achievement in the arts, the Praemium Imperiale Prize for Sculpture in 2009. The artist lives and works in Bristol.