Black and White Circle

One of Richard Long’s outstanding circular works, Black and White Circle, 1988, presents a harmonious vision of nature and an elegant meeting of material and form, two themes that have occupied the artist since the beginning of his career. Composed of irregular pieces of coal and marble, Black and White Circle consists of two circles, a black centre surrounded by a halo of white, and the monumental floor sculpture has a palpable presence redolent with symbolic power. Long balances the individual, jagged rocks and the overall resolved composition, exemplifying the inherent tension between the chaos of the natural world and man’s endeavour to contain the uncontrollable. The artist grew up steeped in Minimalist discourses, and although Black and White Circle is reminiscent of Minimalist works such as Carl Andre’s floor sculptures or Robert Smithson’s earthworks, Long’s aesthetic concerns were more aligned with contemporaneous debates regarding informality, chance and non-traditional media. Long has produced his sculptures in a variety of materials including rocks, branches, bark and charcoal, all of which are locally sourced, and his techniques and choices aim at universality. He continues to return to circles because he sees the form as a means of appealing to all of humanity: ‘I think the fact that they are images that do not belong to me and, in fact, are shared by everyone because they have existed throughout history, actually makes them more powerful than if I was inventing my own idiosyncratic, particular Richard Long-type images’ (R. Long interviewed by R. Cork in Richard Long: Walking in Circles, New York, 1991, p. 250). Black and White Circle is a personal mythology of the natural world and a meditation on the terrestrial as an enduring source of life.