About the Installation
Muddy Gravity is a site-specific mud work by internationally renowned artist Richard Long (b. 1945). This monumental installation has been conceived for the YCBA’s Entrance Court, where Long will make the work on site. Bringing an elemental material from the British landscape into direct dialogue with the iconic architecture of the Louis I. Kahn–designed YCBA building, this new work exemplifies the artist’s longstanding engagement with landscape, movement, and the physical act of making.
Over nearly six decades, Long has expanded the definition of sculpture by treating walking, movement, and natural materials as artistic media. Among the most celebrated aspects of Long’s career are his mud works. These site-specific wall works are formed from tidal mud collected from the River Avon near his hometown of Bristol, England.
To make this work, Long applies the mud without brushes or conventional tools, working only with his hands, water, and gravity. He applies liquid mud to the upper part of the wall, allowing it to flow freely down the surface before drying, fixing something inherently fluid into a permanent image. As Long has said, “I make the top half of the image and nature and gravity makes the bottom half.”
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.
Top image
Richard Long, 2017
© The Artist; Courtesy, Lisson. Photograph by Jack Hems.
