FULL MOON
Sperone Westwater
November 7–December 13, 2025
New York
A grand finale: Richard Long’s show will be the last for Sperone Westwater, closing after fifty years of prominence in the New York art world. Long has shown seventeen times with the gallery, beginning in 1976, so this colossal exhibit is a fitting end point.
The show, curiously, is the kind anyone would want if they were inaugurating a new space, because it takes full advantage of the gallery’s odd configuration. The viewing area at Sperone Westwater consists of four rectangular floors, the narrow end of the rectangle perpendicular to the Bowery. The ground floor widens at its eastern end, but the other three are rather narrow spaces. It is as if the gallery were conceived to show Richard Long, much of whose work, like Flint Line (2025) is rectangular. Flint Line, on the third floor, consists of chunks of “chalk knapped flint from Norfolk, England” arranged in a rectangle 284 by 60 by 6 inches. “Knapping” is the shaping of flint to create a flat face so the stone can be used in construction. Cutting flint is an atavistic act carried out by humans since they began making tools and weapons out of stone. Long reenacts that work as art, a kind of paleolithic act, stone-shaping as Abstract Expressionism. He removes the pieces of flint from nature, roughly shapes them, then arranges them in a rigorously geometric configuration. A homage to what nature gives us and to what we do by imposing our will on nature.
The nature-culture dialectic shapes much of the show. When visitors enter the gallery, the first object they see is the show’s title piece, Full Moon (2025), a huge clay wall work representing the moon 335 inches in diameter that covers the northern wall and reaches up to the fourth floor. The moon is a satellite, but Long reminds us that we use this natural phenomenon to measure time. This is not a photorealist representation of the full moon: Long does not imitate nature; he transforms it by translating it into his own idiom. This notion is replicated in the wall inscription facing the moon: From a full moon to a new moon (2009). The full inscription includes the words “FOURTEEN DAYS OF WANING MOONLIGHT IN THE SIERRA NEVADA SPAIN 2009.” Walking, Long’s essential action, is yet another translation of nature into culture. A pace is a measurement of space as well as a rate of speed, so to walk from full moon to new moon is simultaneously to impose a human dimension on time and to delineate non-human space in human terms.