Image: Hidden, Bristol
Hidden Gallery has listed Richard Long’s ‘The Music of Stones’, dated 2004, on the Richard Long page of its website. The gallery works from a showroom in Islington, north London, and shows work by appointment.
It describes the sheet as an offset lithograph in colours, measuring 87 by 62.5 centimetres. That measurement is of the sheet itself rather than of a frame.
The listing records the work as signed and dated “2013” in black ink — nine years after the date given for the work. The gallery offers no explanation for the gap, and none should be read into it: artists sign editions long after printing for many ordinary reasons, and the entry simply does not say which applies here.
The gallery states that the sheet has been framed in-house to conservation standards, so what it holds is a framed object rather than a loose print.
On the image itself, the gallery quotes Long on his stone circles, where he distinguishes what a circle does outdoors from what it does inside: outdoors, he says, “a circle outdoors focuses our attention on the environment it is in”, while indoors the circle and its materials command attention instead. The gallery frames the work as setting rugged outdoor material into a geometric arrangement within an interior, and finds the interest in the tension between an artificial idea and the organic matter used to carry it out. That reading is the gallery’s, offered alongside Long’s remark rather than drawn from it.
Several things a print record would usually carry are absent. The listing gives no edition size and no numbering, names no printer or publisher, and supplies no provenance, catalogue reference or exhibition history for this impression. On the gallery’s own account, then, the sheet is documented by its medium, its dimensions and its signature, and by nothing further.
