Richard Long, presented alongside John Constable: The Landscape Reimagined in the galleries upstairs at the Yale Centre for British Art (YCBA), offers a direct engagement with the natural world, making nature’s materials part of the work itself.
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 his feet left 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 through photographs, maps, and textual works, in which measurements of time and distance, place names, and phenomena serve as the 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); Château 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), was elected to the Royal Academy of Arts, London (2001), and was awarded Japan’s Praemium Imperiale in sculpture (2009). In addition, he was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (2013) and was knighted in the 2018 Honours List.
Richard Long: Gravity
Wednesday, November 4, 2026–Sunday, July 11, 2027, Entrance Court, Free admission