With his permanent works, Long brings the landscape into institutional, human-made space. The relationship to the outside is preserved due to the artist’s personal relationship to the origin of the chosen material. For his large-scale stone pieces, Long often chooses material that is available at a quarry near the exhibition location. For his large-scale murals and ‘mud drawings’ he frequently uses mud from the river Avon, which flows through his home town of Bristol. Besides this clear local connection of the components used, the organic elements also gain meaning through their respective geology. In several respects, time is a core element of his conceptual work, through which he has been expanding the definition of sculpture since the late 1960s.

Sir Richard Long studied at the West of England College of Art in Bristol from 1962 to 1965 and at St. Martin’s School of Art in London from 1966 to 1968. He was awarded the Turner Prize in 1989. His work, spanning more than sixty years, has been the subject of countless group and solo exhibitions worldwide, including at MoMa in New York, Tate Britain in London and Hamburger Bahnhof in Berlin. Richard Long was part of documenta 5, 1972 as well as documenta 7, 1982 and represented Great Britain at the Biennale di Venezia in 1976. He has participated in no less than 15 biennials. His work is represented in many major collections, including the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Britain in London, the Musée d›Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam and the Kunsthaus Zürich. In 2018, the British Queen Elizabeth II ennobled the internationally awarded artist for his services to art.