CHRISTO (1935 – 2020)
ARTISTS
Christo was a Bulgarian-born artist known for his monumental environmental installations, created in partnership with Jeanne-Claude (1935–2009). Trained at the Fine Arts Academy in Sofia, he left Eastern Europe after the 1956 Hungarian Revolution, eventually settling in Paris, where he met Jeanne-Claude. The pair married in 1959 and soon began producing works associated with Nouveau Réalisme and later Arte Povera.
Christo’s early sculptures used everyday materials—cans, bottles, and objects wrapped in fabric or plastic. With Jeanne-Claude he realized increasingly ambitious outdoor projects, including Dockside Packages (1961), Iron Curtain (1962), and various wrapped buildings across Europe and the U.S. After moving to New York in 1964, they undertook large-scale temporary works such as Valley Curtain (1972), Running Fence (1976), Surrounded Islands (1983), the wrapping of Paris’s Pont Neuf (1985), The Umbrellas (Japan/USA, 1991), and the wrapping of Berlin’s Reichstag (1995). Their celebrated project The Gates in New York’s Central Park was installed in 2005.
Each project required years of planning, extensive permitting, and large teams, funded entirely through the sale of preparatory drawings and models. Temporary, site-specific, and publicly accessible, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s works challenged the boundaries of sculpture and invited broad audiences to rethink the relationship between art, landscape, and collective experience.