Early life and education

Long was born in Bristol, in south-west England. Between 1962 and 1965 he studied at the West of England College of Art, and then, from 1966 to 1968, at Saint Martin's School of Art in London, where he studied under Anthony Caro and Phillip King and became closely associated with fellow student Hamish Fulton.

Work

Several of his works were based around walks that he has made, and as well as land based natural sculpture, he uses the mediums of photography, text and maps of the landscape he has walked over.

In his work, often cited as a response to the environments he walked in, the landscape would be deliberately changed in some way, as in A Line Made by Walking (1967), and sometimes sculptures were made in the landscape from rocks or similar found materials and then photographed. Other pieces consist of photographs or maps of unaltered landscapes accompanied by texts detailing the location and time of the walk it indicates.

His piece Delabole Slate Circle, acquired from the Tate Modern in 1997, is a central piece in Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery.

At Houghton Hall in Norfolk, the Marquess of Cholmondeley commissioned a sculpture to the east of the house. Long's land art there consists of a circle of Cornish slate at the end of a path mown through the grass.

Permanent installations include Riverlines (2006) at the Hearst Tower (at about 35 x 50 feet (11 x 15 meters) this was at the time the biggest wall work he had ever made); Planet Circle (1991) at the Museum De Pont in Tilburg, Netherlands; in the Hallen für Neue Kunst Schaffhausen, Switzerland; and White Water Falls (2012) in the Garvan Institute in Sydney, Australia.

In 2009, a retrospective of Long’s work entitled "Heaven and Earth," appeared at the Tate Britain.

Books

• 2012 South America. Zédélé éditions, Brest, France. First edition: 1972, Konrad Fischer, Düsseldorf.

Selected honours and awards

• 1976 Represented Britain in the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy
• 1989 Turner Prize, Tate Gallery, London, UK
• 1990 Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, French Ministry of Culture, Paris, France
• 2001 Elected to the Royal Academy of Arts
• 2009 Awarded the Praemium Imperiale for sculpture from Japan

Long was appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 2013 New Year Honours for services to art.

Art market

Long's Whitechapel Slate Circle (1981) brought a record price for the artist in 1989 when it sold for $209,000 at Sotheby's in New York. At another auction in 1992, the piece was estimated far more modestly at $120,000 to $160,000, but bidding never exceeded $110,000; instead, the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. purchased it in 1994 through dealer Anthony d'Offay.

[ Source: Wikipedia ]