ART CITIES: London-Christo’s Early works

In monumental sculptures produced and installed in public sites around the world, Christo and Jeanne-Claude expanded the possibilities of artistic scale and dramatically, but temporarily, transformed familiar landscapes. Employing fabric, rope, barrels, and other commonplace materials to visually alter both urban and rural spaces, their works created shared experiences across the globe.

By Dimitris Lempesis
Photo: Gagosian Archive

The exhibition “Christo: Early Works” is the inaugural project in the Gagosian Open series of off-site projects. Gagosian Open is a new program of ambitious temporary projects sited beyond the walls of the gallery that allows audiences to experience remarkable artworks in unusual contexts. For the first presentation in the series, early works by Christo are set in dialogue with a Grade II–listed Georgian house in London’s East End. Foreshadowing the artist’s large-scale temporary public projects, these sculptural works see everyday objects veiled in fabric or plastic and bound with rope or twine. They present an artist who, even at this formative stage of his career, was responding creatively to domestic and urban environments, drawing attention to overlooked details by obscuring them from view. Alluding to the safeguarding of personal belongings, the works, most of which are from the 1960s and 1970s, also speak to ideas of movement, migration, and preservation. The artist’s mixed heritage and experience as a political refugee, daringly escaping Stalin-era Bulgaria to Prague, then relocating to Vienna, Geneva, Paris, and eventually New York, defined him as an eternal wanderer—”l’étranger”, as he referred to himself. This is echoed by the history of 4 Princelet Street itself as a house that has been home to successive migrant families. The property was first constructed in 1723 to house Huguenot migrants—the UK’s first refugees. The area has since welcomed Irish linen workers, Eastern European Jews, Jews from the Netherlands, and most recently members of Spitalfields’ large Bangladeshi community. Renowned for their monumental temporary artworks, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, his wife and artistic collaborator, came to effectively redefine the relationship between art and public space, expanding the possibilities of scale and transforming familiar landscapes. Often requiring extensive planning and negotiation, these self-funded projects exist only for brief periods, after which their materials are repurposed or recycled, and the sites restored to their original state. “Selected Works” marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s last project in the city in 1998, when they wrapped 178 trees around the Fondation Beyeler in 55,000 square meters of woven polyester fabric. Christo moved to Paris in 1958, establishing a studio in a small maid’s room at 14 rue de Saint Sénoch in the 17th arrondissement. Here, he created his first “Wrapped Objects” and barrel structures, elements that became dominant in his sculptural practice. Christo found inspiration from connections with leading figures of the European and American avant-garde, including Joseph Beuys, John Cage, Nam June Paik, Pierre Restany, and Karlheinz Stockhausen. The same year, he also met Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, who became his wife and creative partner, coauthoring the monumental environmental works of art that changed the way we think of public art, and with which their names became synonymous. The highly tactile works from the “Surfaces d’Empaquetage” (1958–61) series are composed with crumpled or crushed fabric or paper coated with thin layers of lacquer and sand. In 1959, after visiting an exhibition that included work by Jean Dubuffet, Christo embarked on another series, “Cratères”. The many thick, coagulated layers of dark brown paint characterizing these wall-mounted panels reveal his growing interest in three-dimensionality. In some, he attached empty paint cans to the base before applying a mixture of sand, enamel, and glue, creating a mesh of furrows, trenches, and depressions that penetrate the pictorial space. Most of Christo’s first “Wrapped Objects” sculptures incorporate conventional art materials such as paint cans and pigment bottles, swathed in resin-soaked canvas. Enveloping everyday objects with fabric or polyethylene sheets and binding them with rope, he altered their contours and surfaces, playing with their identities which he sometimes revealed and at other times concealed. Initially the result of instinctive aesthetic experiments, the series endured for more than sixty years, informing ever larger and more complex interventions leading to the massive 2021 project “L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped”, which he first proposed in 1961. Christo was first intrigued by steel oil drums mainly because they were big, inexpensive, and almost indestructible. He began to cover them with the same fabric, varnish, paint, and sand that he used on smaller objects like cans and bottles. While the latter works recall classical still lifes, the larger dimensions of the barrels and their arrangements into groups gave them a monumental character, prompting Christo to expand the scale of his environmental works. Sixty years ago this month, on the evening of June 27, 1962, Christo and Jeanne-Claude installed “Wall of Oil Barrels—The Iron Curtain” closing the historic rue Visconti with eighty-nine barrels. The 4.2-meter-high barricade blocked one of narrowest streets in Paris for eight hours, obstructing most of the traffic through the Left Bank.

Photo Left: Exterior view, 4 Princelet Street, London E1 6QH, Photo: Lucy Dawkins, Courtesy Gagosian. Photo Right: Christo, Dolly, 1964, Wood crate on casters, tarpaulin, polyethylene, fabric, ropes, and straps, 72 1/16 x 39 15/16 x 32 1/4 inches (183 x 101.5 x 82 cm), © Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, Photo: Eeva-Inkeri, Courtesy Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation and Gagosian

Info: Curator: Elena Geuna, Gagosian Open, 4 Princelet Street, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 6-22/10/2023, Days & Hours: Mon-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/