About the Installation
Gravity is a site-specific work by internationally renowned artist Richard Long (b. 1945). This monumental installation, conceived for the YCBA’s Entrance Court, brings the elemental materials of the landscape inside the museum. Working directly with his hands, without brushes or tools, Long sweeps clay across the wall to create a dynamic composition shaped by gesture and gravity. As Long has explained, “I make the top half of the image and nature and gravity make the bottom half.” The work emerges from a collaboration between the artist’s actions and the natural forces he sets in motion.
Presented alongside John Constable: The Landscape Reimagined in the galleries upstairs, Gravity offers a direct engagement with the natural world, making nature’s materials part of the work itself.
About the artist
Richard Long has been in the vanguard of conceptual art in Britain since he created A Line Made by Walking over half a century ago in 1967, while still a student. This photograph of the path left by his feet in the grass, a fixed line of movement, established a precedent that art could be a journey. From that time he expanded his walks to wilderness regions all over the world, including a walk in the Alps that was documented by his first text work for the seminal exhibition titled When Attitude Becomes Form at the Kunsthalle Bern in 1969. After 1969, he began making journeys and sculptures in wilderness places all around the world.
In the 1980s, Long began making new types of mud works using handprints applied directly to the wall. He also continued to make large sculptures of lines and circles from slate, driftwood, footprints, or stone, often sourced from quarries near the exhibition sites. The walks and temporary works of passage are recorded with photographs, maps and text works, where measurements of time and distance, place names, and phenomena are vocabulary for both original ideas and powerful, condensed narratives.
Richard Long was born in Bristol, UK, in 1945 and he lives and works between London and Bristol. He studied at the West of England College of Art, Bristol (1962–65), then St Martin’s School of Art, London (1966–68).
Major solo exhibitions include Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, the Netherlands (2023); M Leuven, Leuven, Belgium (2021); Chateau La Coste, Provence, France (2021); De Pont Museum, Tilburg, Netherlands (2019); Fondation CAB, Brussels, Belgium (2018); Houghton Hall, Norfolk, UK (2017); Arnolfini, Bristol, UK (2015); Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin, Germany (2010); Tate Britain, London, UK (2009); Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh, UK (2007); San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA, USA (2006); National Museum of Modern Art, Kyoto, Japan (1996); Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, PA, USA (1994); and Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York, NY, USA (1986).
Long represented Britain at the 37th Venice Biennale (1976) and won the Turner Prize (1989). He received the Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres from the French Ministry of Culture (1990), has been elected to the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2001), and was awarded Japan’s Praemium Imperiale in the field of sculpture (2009). In addition, he has been made a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (2013) and was knighted in the 2018 Honours List.
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Richard Long: Gravity is presented with generous support from the Bukhman Foundation.
Top image
Richard Long, 2017
© The Artist; Courtesy, Lisson. Photograph by Jack Hems.
Extended reading
