Christo & Jeanne Claude

Christo & Jeanne Claude
Eight key projects
Laurence Grigorov

Design and architecture are important themes and elements that Laurence Grigorov focuses and pays attention to. Leading the
team at a high-end and luxury residential property development company based in South Africa, Laurence Grigorov looks for
inspiration from international design styles. Artists and creative people are at the forefront of design trends and are often able to
push boundaries and create visual artworks that inspire.
Following the sad news that Christo has died, here are eight key projects by the Bulgarian artist and his late partner Jeanne
Claude. This article was originally published when Christo and Jeanne Claude's London Mastaba sculpture was unveiled in 2018.
At the time, Christo spoke to Dezeen about his life and career in a series of two exclusive video interviews. In the first movie, the
artist explained how the giant London Mastaba installation was the culmination of over 60 years of working with stacked barrels.
In the second, he looked back at some of his and Jeanne Claude's most ambitious projects.
The art duo are famous for their large scale pieces that involve wrapping landmark buildings and landscapes in huge amounts of
fabric, or creating temporary structures from colourful oil barrels. Despite the best efforts of critics to ascribe specific meaning to
their work, the artists always insisted that their pieces are simply about experiencing the artwork in the moment, in the context of
its environment.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude were born on the same day
in 1935, Christo in Gabrovo, Bulgaria and Jeanne-
Claude in Casablanca in Morocco. At the age of 21,
Christo fled the Stalinist regime in his home country to
Paris, where he met Jeanne-Claude in 1958 when he
was commissioned to paint her mother's portrait.
By 1961 they were collaborating on art works, in a
romantic and artistic union that lasted until Jeanne-
Claude's death in 2009. When she was still alive, the
married couple were always careful to travel in separate
planes so that if one were to perish in a crash the other
would be able to continue their work.
Fiercely determined to retain complete artistic freedom,
the pair self-funded their installations by selling original
artworks and insisting on paying their assistants union
or above minimum wages. After a work is complete, all
the materials are recycled and the location returned to
its original state.
Their work defies categorisation, blending art,
architecture and sculpture.

Wall of Oil Barrels - The Iron Curtain, Rue Visconti, Paris, 1961-62
For one of their first works together, Christo and Jeanne-Claude blockaded one of
Paris' narrowest streets with a wall of 89 found metal oil barrels in a protest against
the Berlin Wall, which had just been built.
Europe was unstable and tensions were running high in the city, with the violence of
the Algerian War of Independence and the Paris massacre of 1961, where the police
had attacked and killed demonstrators.
Called The Iron Curtain, it temporarily transformed the street into a dead end. The
illegal art barricade remained in place for eight hours, blocking traffic. The artists
been refused permission for the project and continued regardless, until the police
demanded they remove it.

Wrapped Coast, One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Sydney,
Australia, 1969
For ten weeks in the October of 1969, 1.5 miles of Australian
coastline was wrapped in 92,900 square metres of erosion-
control fabric, lashed to the cliffs with 35 miles of
polypropylene rope.
A team of 15 professional mountain climbers and 110 workers
were lead by a retired major from the Army Corps of
worked for four weeks to wrap the coastline.
This time the pair had permission from Prince Henry Hospital
to undertake the project, although the team were hampered
by a storm that ripped off some of the fabric midway through
the wrapping process.

Valley Curtain, Rifle, Colorado, 1972
For 28 months Christo and Jeanne-Claude worked
with designers, builders, and students to create a
partition of orange fabric hung between two
mountains in Colorado, in a piece called Valley
Curtain.
It was 381 metres long and suspended at a height
111 metres. Keeping the curtain in place
417 metres of cable, weighing 61 tons and anchored
to 864 tons of concrete foundations.
The last ropes were secured at 11 am on 10 August
1972, and the billowing screen of woven nylon
remained in situ for 28 hours until high winds
it to be taken down.

Surrounded Islands, Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida, 1983
Using 603,870 square metres of luminous pink fabric selected to
compliment the shallow waters and Miami skies, the artists
surrounded a series of islands in Biscayne Bay.
Having obtained permission from government agencies, they
created floating rafts of fabric attached to octagonal, pink-
booms that were towed into place, unfurled and anchored in
place.
For the two weeks that Surrounded Islands were on display 120
people in inflatable boats monitored the work. When it was
removed the location was in better condition than when they
started, thanks to the team removing some 40 tons of rubbish
had washed up on the islands or was floating around it.

The Gates, Central Park, New York City, 2005
In 2005 the art duo installed 7,503 fabric
panels suspended from saffron-coloured
steel gateways built along 23 miles of
walkways through New York City's Central
Park. Teams of 600 workers in special
uniforms were paid to install the gates, with
further 300 employed to monitor and later
remove the work.
The rectangular gates were designed to
mirror the city's grid pattern, and the
saffron fabric designed to move in the
breeze, reflecting the movement in the bare
trees and casting golden shadows on
who walked through them.

The Floating Piers, Lake Iseo, Italy, 2016
Although Jeanne-Claude passed away in
2009, Christo continued with their life's work
and realised a project the couple had first
dreamed up in 1970. It was his first work
since they had created The Gates and the
death of his wife.
For 16 days in the summer of 2016 an
iridescent carpet of yellow fabric suspended
on floating docks stretched for three
kilometres across a lake in Italy. Completely
free to experience, as always, visitors could
walk from the shore to several islands or
climb the mountainsides to see the golden
walkways spreading out below.

The London Mastaba, Serpentine Lake, London,
2018
The artist and his late wife have been fascinated
by trapezoid form of mastaba, found in the
architecture of benches in Mesopotamian era
and in the tombs of ancient Egyptian kings.
had originally planned to float one on Late
Michigan back in 1967.
In his first major work in the UK, Christo created
floating structure of 7,506 specially made barrels
fixed to a scaffold anchored to the bottom of
Serpentine Lake. Painted in shades of red, blue
and mauve, The London Mastaba recalls
Impressionist art as its reflection distorts in the
water disturbed by the splashing of waterfowl,
pedalo boats and outdoor swimmers.

Scale model of The Mastaba for Abu Dhabi, unbuilt
At the venerable age of 83, Christo is still stubbornly
determined to realise one of his and Jeanne-
most ambitious projects: a 150-metre-high mastaba
in the desert in Abu Dhabi.
The pair began scouting potential locations back in
1977 and if built, it would be the largest sculpture in
the world. It would require 410,000 barrels, which
Christo plans to have painted in eight different
colours to form a shimmering mosaic reminiscent of
those found in Islamic architecture.
It would be Christo and Jeanne-Claude's only
permanent piece of work.
Words & images courtesy of www.dezeen.com

Christo & Jeanne Claude

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