'Richard Long: From Popocatépetl to the Pacific' at Casa Wabi, Puerto Escondido, Mexico

29 December 2025

Until 3 January 2027, Casa Wabi presents ‘Richard Long: From Popocatépetl to the Pacific'.

Since the late 1960s, Richard Long (England, 1945) has made walking a form of art, transforming a universal and everyday action into a powerful way of relating to the land and of turning human experience into an aesthetic form. His works, the result of a keen sensitivity to nature, establish a dialogue with the landscape through minimal gestures of great poetic resonance. These interventions—at once ephemeral and enduring—bring into focus the human dimension in relation to the vastness of geological time, inscribed in the stone and earth that constitute his works, as well as the conceptual force of the gesture.

The works presented reflect Long’s sustained interest in Mexican topography, a country he has traversed on numerous occasions since the 1970s. Volcanic stones from the central valleys of Mexico and slate slabs from Puebla are simply rearranged within the space of Casa Wabi, employing elementary geometric forms so that the human gesture and the formal qualities inherent to the materials become the central axis of the work. It is in the forms and qualities of the stones that the beauty and poetics of the pieces reside.

A similar approach can be seen in the wall work made with earth from the coast of Oaxaca, where the color and texture of the material are as significant as the perceptible movement of the artist’s hand. Long’s practice is sustained by a constant oscillation between discovery and intention: between the act of finding the stones and the experience of being found by them. This relationship guides the inception and realization of the works, which combine a careful attention to formal aspects—the presence and character of the stones, the color of the earth—with a conceptual practice in which gesture and human scale occupy a central place.

Find out more via Casa Wabi.

Image: Portrait of Richard Long, Mexico City, 2020. Photograph by Joanna Thornberry