Richard Long, a British conceptual artist, will be a highlight of Chinati Weekend with an open exhibition and talk from the artist about his groundbreaking work in Britain and beyond.
Early on, Long’s work — including sculpture, drawings and text — focused on land art, the use of natural materials like mud, rocks and grass, often with installations in plein air. That expanded over the years to galleries and other spaces, but the foundation for his work is walking. A prodigious walker, Long covered several contents, walking hundreds of miles, for his inspiration.
As the Guardian wrote in an interview with Long: “Long’s art is hugely evocative on many levels. His elemental forms feel familiar to people, whether they’re a cross in a meadow formed by pulling the heads off daisies or a circle of boulders left in a high mountain pass. They seem to echo the primal traces left by ancient cultures: the vast ‘ground drawings,’ created by Indigenous Peruvians or Britain’s Neolithic stone monuments.”
Or as Long says in his own words: “A balance between the patterns of nature and the formalism of human, abstract ideas like lines and circles. It is where my human characteristics meet the natural forces and patterns of the world — that is the subject of my work.”
The Chinati Foundation will present ROCKS RIVER, an exhibition of new work by Long, who Donald Judd once described as “the best in Europe.” Judd installed Long’s work Sea Lava Circles (1988) — Icelandic lava stones placed in an arrangement of three concentric circles — on a concrete platform, formerly a tennis court, adjacent to Chinati’s Arena. This is the first exhibition dedicated to new work by Long in the foundation’s 40-year history.
Since the mid-1960s, Long has been celebrated internationally for works that incorporate, in a variety of combinations, walking, photographs, text, and common environmental materials like stones, mud, and water. Long’s seminal A Line Made by Walking, 1967, consists of a walk along a line of indeterminate length and duration, resulting in a photograph of lightly flattened grass. With this work, and others of the period, Long introduced new questions to the language of sculpture, performance, and documentation, with which artists and art historians still grapple. For his upcoming exhibition at Chinati, Long pursues an artmaking practice which, while fundamentally consistent in its materials and methods, often involves universal entities such as lines and circles. As he said in a 2020 interview with the Brooklyn Rail, “Every walk is about a different idea.”
Following the opening, a series of related public programs will take place throughout late 2026 and 2027. Details about these events will be shared in the coming months. The exhibition schedule includes:
Saturday, Oct. 10
Exhibition opening
Champagne toast and remarks – 10:15 a.m.
Talk
Richard Long followed by a conversation with Sir Nicholas Serota
Crowley Theater, 98 S. Austin St. – 2 p.m.
Sunday, Oct. 11
Open viewing – 10 a.m.–1 p.m.
