Christo

Christo, in full Christo Javacheff, was born on 13 June 1935 in Gabrovo, in Bulgaria. An environmental sculptor known for his controversial works, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia, in Bulgaria, then stage design at the Burian Theatre in Prague, and later in Vienna for a semester in 1956.

After a short stay in Switzerland, he moved to Paris in 1958, where he met the person who was to be the most influential in his private life, as well as in his art, and with whom he became an artistic unit from then on: Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, whom he married in 1959.

With Jeanne-Claude (1935-2009) he began an artistic collaboration that would last their whole life together. In 1964, the couple moved to New York.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude and the iconic public building wrappings

 In these years he began to realise his ‘wrappings’ of iconic public buildings in their monumentality with fabrics and plastics: a palace in Manhattan, the fountain in Spoleto, the monument dedicated to Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan, Porta Pinciana in Rome, The Pont Neuf Wrapped, the draping of the double bridge over the Seine in Paris, the Reichstag in Berlin in 1995, and in 2021, posthumously the work conceived by the couple in 1962: the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

Christo, the land art with natural scenery wraps

Neo-Dadaist or human-interventionist wrapping works alternate from buildings to natural scenery: the colossal Wrapped Cost in Sydney in 1969, Wrapped Tree – a wrapped tree at the Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven in the Netherlands, Running Fence in California in 1976, Valley Curtain in Colorado in 1972, Surrounded Islands in Miami in 1984, The Gates in New York (Central Park) in 2004, The Floating Piers on Lake Iseo, in Italy in 2016, a 3-kilometre walkway that made it possible to ‘walk on water’.

Other notable works

The Umbrellas is among the most colossal works ever created by Christo. To create it from 1984 to 1991, 1,340 giant blue umbrellas were installed in Ibaraki, on the coast of Japan, and 1,760 giant yellow umbrellas on the coast of California, in the United States. Each umbrella was six metres high and had a diameter of 8.7 metres.

In 1992, Christo designed Over the River, a work that involved covering an 11-kilometre stretch of the Arkansas River in Colorado with a series of fabric drapes, supported by steel cables.

In 2018, Christo set up a floating work consisting of 7506 coloured barrels resting on plastic cubes in the Serpentine Lake, in London’s Hyde Park (The London Mastaba).

He died in New York on May 31, 2020.