Christo

1935-2020

Across his decades long career, Bulgarian draughtsman and installation artist Christo carved out a unique form of public art through his imaginative engagement with materials and outdoor space. Working with his wife Jean‐Claude to implement their ambitious designs, Christo created entrancing installations which force viewers to reconsider their surroundings. Taking shape in different spaces and parts of the world, each project involves a clever and meticulous use of fabric in order to emphasise or divide space. Such novel installations have left their mark on art history and influenced the trajectory of movements like Land Art.

Born Christo Vladimirov Javacheff in 1935 in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, Christo took art lessons as a child before he went to Sofia to study at the Fine Arts Academy. Studying whilst under a communist regime, his assignments included propaganda projects such as advising farmers along the Orient Express on how to arrange their haystacks and machinery to give the illusion of activity and prosperity. Christo noted that this experience taught him how to engage with open spaces and
interact with people outside the realm of academia.

In 1956, Christo escaped the eastern block to Vienna and then Geneva before settling in Paris in 1958. Earning money as a portrait painter, Christo soon met Jean‐Claude while he was painting her mother.

While in Paris, he collected materials like bottles and cans which he wrapped in wet canvas, tied with twine and painted black or grey, inevitably creating the work ‘Inventory’ (1959‐1960), which launched his iconic visual language. In 1961, with the help of Jean‐Claude, he exhibited at Galerie Haro Lauhus in Cologne. Christo filled the gallery with found objects like stacked oil drums and a wrapped Renault car, and arranged wrapped objects around the nearby docks. Critics understand these early works as critiques of packaging and advertising in the new world of mass‐production.

In 1964, Christo and Jean‐Claude moved to New York where he began producing drawings and plans to wrap entire buildings. He defined this time when he and Jean‐Claude were producing the preliminary part of their art as the ‘software period’, which was followed by the ‘hardware period’, a time when these plans physically materialised. Due to issues with receiving permission to implement their visions for public artworks, much of the designs took many years to realise, if at all. None of their installations are supported by the public but are funded entirely from the sale of their drawings and models.

Among Christo’s monumental and temporary projects are ‘Running Fence’ (1972‐76), ‘Surrounded Islands’ (1980‐83), ‘Wrapped Reichstag’ (1971‐95) and ‘Central Park, New York City’ (1979‐2005). Taking shape in different spaces and parts of the world, each project involves a clever use of fabric in order to emphasise or divide space. Some are structures which are guided by natural terrain while others surround or wrap pre‐existing structures. In each case, the engagement with material is anything but random; every pleat, fold and placement of attaching cord is meticulously composed like lines in a drawing.

Christo’s novel installations left their mark on art history, notably on the trajectory of Land Art. He died in May 2020, shortly before the realisation of his lifelong dream of wrapping the Arc de Triumph in Paris. Nonetheless, he has asserted that this project and other unrealised projects can indeed materialise even after his death, with every detail of their plans already in place. Therefore, Christo can continue to emerge in the public sphere posthumously with his innovative and fresh artworks, which, as he remarked, have ‘no function – except maybe to make pleasure’.

RUNNING FENCE

Christo

In 1976, Christo unveiled one of his ambitious projects ‘Running Fence’. This awe‐inspiring 39.4 km long fence directed viewers down the public roads of Sonoma and Marin counties in Northern California, as it wound through farmland on its way down to the Pacific Ocean. As explained by Christo, ‘Running Fence’ had ‘no end or start, only east and west’.

‘Running Fence’ was made of heavy woven white nylon fabric which hung from steel cables strung between poles, which were once used by the military to construct airports in Vietnam. Zigzagging through the hilly terrain and finally into the ocean, the installation recalls the fortified structure of the Great Wall of China, however with an important difference. ‘Running Fence’, though sturdily embedded into the ground, was intended to interact with the environment, responding to movements of the wind and water and absorbing the changing light, establishing it as a remarkably dynamic work.

‘Running Fence’ was finally installed after 42 months of the exhausted efforts of Christo and Jean‐ Claude to convince local authorities to grant them permission. Indeed, their plans even included a 450‐page environmental impact report which detailed how the materials used would be redistributed for the use of the local people. It was by all intents and purposes a mammoth project with a nonetheless temporal ephemerality, lasting only two weeks. Collages, models, lithographs, photographs and preparatory drawings related to the project remain in circulation as not only the
means through which the project itself was funded, but also detailed documentation that keeps the memory of ‘Running Fence’ very much alive.

WRAPPED REICHSTAG

Christo

Christo’s ‘Wrapped Reichstag’ stands as perhaps the most symbolic and emotional project in his oeuvre. Unveiled in June 1995, the project was the culmination of a decades‐long dream of wrapping
Germany’s powerful symbol of democracy in the artist’s characteristic sensual fabric.

‘Wrapped Reichstag’ was first conceived 24 years prior to its installation at a time when the Reichstag stood as the only building under the jurisdiction of both the East and West Berlin authorities. Such was particularly attractive to Christo whose Bulgarian roots connected him on a personal level to this divide. While the Reichstag was scarcely used at this time, authorities rejected three of Christo’s proposals given the incredible tension that was associated with the building. Christo’s project was finally approved following the unification of Germany and prior to the reinstatement of the Reichstag as the seat of a unified national parliament.

In ‘Wrapped Reichstag’, the building is covered in its entirety by silvery fabric which was set in place by blue ropes. Meticulously situated, these ropes allow for the fabric to gracefully fall without restriction, forming elegant pleats as it outlines and enhances the fundamental features of the iconic structure.

The response to the installation was overwhelmingly positive, with one journalist writing ‘If the architecture of the Reichstag represents a kind of Prussian hardness – Germany as it was – the wrapped version can almost be seen as an ideal symbol of the new Germany’. In fact, the government asked to extend the installation past the two‐week period which Christo declined, noting that the impermanence and fleeting quality of the work is fundamental to its impact on audiences. Disassembled and gone from view, the incredulity of the project is maintained in the documentation the lives on through preparatory drawings, collages, photographs and lithographs.

THE GATES

Christo

In January 2005 Christo unveiled ‘The Gates’ in New York’s Central Park. For over two weeks, the artist’s elegant structures lined the winding pathways of the iconic park in their serene imitations of
Manhattan’s iconic structures.

From thin orange structures standing at nearly five metres tall with varied widths hang saffron coloured fabric which extends to about two metres above the ground, rendering the surrounding environment dream‐like. The fabric in its rectangular shape is meant to imitate the grid patterns of the surrounding towering structures, while the structure of the gates themselves were inspired by the Japanese ‘torii’ gates, which are purchased as offerings for prosperity.

In ‘The Gates’ a total of 7,503 gates line over 23 miles of pathways, evenly spaced at nearly four metres apart except in instances of low hanging branches. They were therefore structures that begged visitor interaction by way of walking through them and following their lead through the park.

Whilst Christo had spent 30 years convincing local authorities to grant him permission for the project, ‘The Gates’ appeared to have been approved at a time when New Yorkers most needed it. Unveiled at a time when the US was still reeling from the tragedy of 9/11, ‘The Gates’ offered a much‐needed place of solace. With the fabrics whipping like flags in response to the elements, the installation seemed to ask visitors to slow down as it took them on an exceptionally peaceful and mediative stroll.

‘The Gates’ remain one of Christo’s most iconic projects and a hallmark of his aesthetic of temporary, site specific work. Physically gone, the artwork is nonetheless engrained in history through not only the memories of the millions of visitors who experienced it, but also through beautiful documentary photographs, collages, drawings and lithographs.

WRAPPED OBJECTS

Christo

Christo is well‐known for his monumental projects like ‘Wrapped Reichstag’ (1971‐95) and ‘The Pont Neuf Wrapped’ (1975‐85) in which iconic landmarks are covered in fabric affixed in place by rope.
However, he also brought this technique to smaller works, wrapping women and objects like sculptures.

Christo produced his first wrapped work in 1959 with ‘Inventory’, objects he collected, covered in wet canvas and painted. This project, which would inspire the aesthetic he brought to his
monumental installations and smaller sculptures alike, fundamentally concerned itself with the transformative power of fabric. This practice of revelation through concealment beckons questions of how we read familiar objects when they are obscured.

In 1962, Christo first applied this logic to live models whilst at Yves Klein’s home where he wrapped the naked bodies of women in fabric, a practice he repeated the same year in Dusseldorf and London. In 1968 he returned to the practice at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia with ‘Wrapped Woman’, an installation in which seven women were wrapped in polyethylene and ropes for five hours.

Christo also wrapped small scale structures, like the sculptures outside the Villa Borghese in Rome in 1963, a project that remained in place for months as it was mistaken by officials as conservation
work. In each instance, what is remarkable in Christo’s wrappings are the disordered folds of the fabric, the occasional bulges and bunching, as well as the apparent spontaneity of the ropes which give the appearance that the person or object underneath is attempting to escape.