Hirshhorn spotlights Richard Long’s 14-metre marble ‘Carrara Line’ in ‘Big Things for Big Rooms’

The Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden has put Richard Long’s ‘Carrara Line’ (1985) at the centre of a collection highlight, urging visitors to step inside ‘Big Things for Big Rooms’ and come closer to the work. The sculpture is installed on the museum’s third floor and remains on view with the exhibition through 4 July 2027.

Long, born in Bristol in 1945, has spent five decades pushing sculpture against the edges of performance and conceptual art through his explorations of natural landscapes. His practice is built on solitary walks through rural terrain, which supply both the inspiration and the raw material for the work — and which the artist regards as the actual artwork, with the gallery installation standing as its trace.

‘Carrara Line’ makes that idea physical. Cut from marble and measuring 28.6 by 146.4 by 1,447.8 cm — close to fourteen and a half metres end to end — it uses the quarry stone of Carrara to register route and duration rather than monumentality or figuration, offering an index of place and a deliberate counterpoint to classical marble sculpture. The Hirshhorn acquired it in 2007 through the Joseph H. Hirshhorn Purchase Fund as part of the Panza Collection, and first showed it in ‘The Panza Collection’ in 2008–09.

‘Big Things for Big Rooms’ opened on 20 December 2025 and traces the development of immersive, large-scale work since the late 1960s across ten pieces, five of them on view at the museum for the first time. Long appears in the exhibition’s first half alongside Dan Flavin, Sam Gilliam, Robert Irwin and Lygia Pape, with Paul Chan, Olafur Eliasson, Spencer Finch, Rashid Johnson and Mika Rottenberg in the second. It is organised by Head Curator Evelyn C. Hankins with Curatorial Assistant CJ Greenhill Caldera. The museum has also pointed visitors to a four-minute video in which Long discusses his collaborations with the architect Norman Foster.