A work by Richard Long, a great Land Art artist, arrives at the Acropolis in Athens

A great contemporary artist on theAcropolis of Athens: it is British artist Richard Long (Bristol, 1945), who brings to Greece’s capital his Athens Slate Line, installed in the vicinity of the temple of Dionysus Eleutherius on the southern slope of the Acropolis. The installation, on view from July 21 to Sept. 30, is being shown to the public for the first time since its conception in 1984. It is also Long’s first work to be seen in public since the lockdown.

Long is one of the leading exponents of British and world Land Art, and has placed his installations in different areas of the world, from the Sahara Desert to the expanses of Australia, and has also shown his work at the Venice Biennale, Documenta and several major exhibitions. His Athens Slate Line is a strip of slate bricks put together to form a rectangular line: the form is meant to evoke a path that evokes the meditative nature of the act of walking, which combines physical endurance with the principles of order, action and idea. It is also a new way to view the Acropolis area. The line is, after all, one of the basic elements of Long’s poetics, ever since its first appearance, A Line made by walking in 1967, proposed when the artist was a 22-year-old student at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London: at the time, the work was created simply by walking the same path several times in a Wiltshire field.

The exhibition is curated by Elina Kountouris, director of Neon, a nonprofit organization dedicated to contemporary art, which made the event possible, in collaboration with the Ministry of Culture and Sports of Greece.

A work by Richard Long, a great Land Art artist, arrives at the Acropolis in Athens

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