Richard Long studied at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London from 1966 to 1968, where one of his fellow students was Hamish Fulton, with whom he shares many of the aesthetic criteria of land art. They are both key figures in the emergence of this movement from the mid 1960s onwards. In the late 1960s he also took part in major exhibitions of arte povera in Italy and so-called earth art in the USA. In 1967 he produced his first walked-line piece - A Line Made by Walking- via photographic records. It is considered a landmark in contemporary art. From then on he turned walking into a form of art and a characteristic trait of his works, and forged a close relationship with nature. As he walks, he leaves his own individual mark on the landscape via the geometrical arrangement (usually in circles, lines or spirals) of residual elements taken from it that last only in photographs; he may also convey the experience in the form of texts, or a combination of the two; or he may use it in paintings, sculptures, drawings and installations. He seeks a balance between the forms of nature and the formalism of abstract human ideas, striving to attain the universal and the transcendental.

Since the 1970s his work has been shown at leading international art venues, including the Whitechapel Art Gallery (London, 1971), the Museum of Modern Art (New York, 1972), the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York, 1986), the Centre national d’art contemporain in Grenoble (France, 1987), the Tate Gallery (London, 1990), the Kunstverein Hannover (Hanover, Germany, 1999), the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (2000), the Tate Britain (London, 2009) and the Hamburger Bahnhof (Berlin, 2011). He has taken part in the Venice Biennale (1976), the São Paulo Biennial (1994) and Art Basel (Basel, Switzerland, 2014). He has also been nominated four times for the Turner Prize, which he won in 1989.

Roberto Díaz