BUENOS AIRES.- Faena Arts Center announces the opening of Mendoza Walking, Richard Long’s first exhibition in Argentina and first solo show in Latin America, curated by Faena Arts Center (FAC) Director and Chief Curator, Ximena Caminos. The exhibition, which includes two new site-specific works, has been 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 is on view from June 28 - 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 forty 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 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 pine wood chips from the North Western provinces of Argentina’s Littoral region; the monumental text work Mendoza Walking; a selection of photographs of sculptures in the landscape throughout the Argentinian region Cuyo; and a smaller, narrative textwork from the same journey.

“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.

In the nature of things:
Art about mobility, lightness and freedom.
Simple creative acts of walking and marking about place, locality, time,
distance, and measurement.
Works using raw materials and my human scale in the reality of landscapes.
The music of stones, paths of shared footmarks,
sleeping by the river's roar. - 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).