Richard Long
Mendoza Walking
June 28–July 28, 2014
Faena Arts Center
Aimé Paine 1169
Argentina
Hours: Saturday–Monday noon–7pm
T +4010 9233
Faena Arts Center is pleased to announce the opening of Mendoza Walking, Richard Long’s first exhibition in Argentina, curated by Faena Arts Center (FAC) Director and Chief Curator, Ximena Caminos. Four works, including two new site-specific works, will be installed in the historic Los Molinos Room of the FAC’s landmark building. These works utilize materials native to the region and explore the relationship between art and nature, between human potential and environmental realities. The exhibition will be on view from June 28 to July 28. The accompanying exhibition catalog includes an essay by Angela Westwater, co-founder of Sperone Westwater, New York, which since its founding in 1975 has represented the artist.
For over 40 years, Richard Long has pioneered walking as sculptural practice and, in so doing, has visited some of the world’s most remote and wild landscapes. While informed by their specific environment, the artist’s works transcend territorial limits. Long has said, “A path is the place of many journeys. It is there before and after the walk that I make on it.”
Mendoza Walking, Richard Long’s first exhibition in Argentina, was inspired by recent journeys through the Tupungato and Cordón del Plata in the Andes of Mendoza, Argentina, in particular his walk and sculpture made in sight of Aconcagua, the highest mountain in the Americas, as well as the artist’s visits to Buenos Aires, el Paraná and Las Pampas. Long’s work is the act of walking itself, the documentation of the walk in photography and text, the sculptures he makes in-situ, as he intervenes in the landscape, and finally the sculptures he makes specifically for the gallery utilizing materials such as clay, stone, and wood. Long invites visitors to share his intimate dialogue with Argentina’s epic landscape through the installation of four artworks including Andes-Paraná, a large-scale mud work made with mud and clay native to Argentina on-site for the Los Molinos room of the FAC; Pampas Dreaming, a sculpture made with wood from the North Western provinces of Argentina’s Littoral region; the monumental text work Poesía, and a selection of photographs of sculptures in the landscape throughout the Argentinian region Cuyo.
“Richard Long’s organic and contemplative meditations in nature—which we are given access to in his installation for the historic site, Los Molinos—remind us of our own steps, the ephemeral and profound marks we leave on the surface of the earth and the possibilities that exist to develop our commitment to the natural world and reengage with our surroundings,” says Caminos.
Richard Long
Long was born in 1945 in Bristol, England, where he currently lives and works. He studied at West of England College of Art and at St. Martin’s School of Art, London. Long was awarded the Turner Prize in 1989 and received the Praemium Imperiale Art Award in 2009. He has had numerous major solo exhibitions, including retrospectives, at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (1986), the Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris (1993), the Setagaya Art Museum, Tokyo (1996), the Museo di Arte, Trento, Italy (2000), the Museu Serralves, Portugal (2001), Tate St. Ives, Cornwall (2002), San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (2006), Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art, Edinburgh (2007), Musée d‘Art moderne et d‘Art contemporain de Nice (2008), Tate Britain, London (2009) and Hamburger Bahnhof, Berlin (2010).
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