ENTITRE
a tribute to physical matter in the digital age.
is life without Christo still bearable?
sketches of Christo’s L’Arc de Triomphe,Wrapped on sale at the 2020 BRAFA
He was meant to wrap the Arc de Triomphe in September MMXX and add his touch to the grandparis but on May 31st Christo, the poetic landscape artist, sadly passed away.
We found Christo’s 2016 floating Piers installation on Lake Iseo in Italy particularly moving as it was executed a few years after his wife’s death and was a project they both had at heart to execute. After multiple failed attempts in Rio de Plata in Argentina and Tokya Bay in Japan, Christo got the permission to extend his orange fabric on the surface of the lake Iseo in 2016 to everyone’s delight, a surreal experience that attracted crowds of visitors.
Born in Bulgaria in 1935, Christo Vladimiroff Javacheff attended the Fine Arts Academy in Sofia and first started his artistic career as a portrait painter in Paris after fleeing Prague when the Hungarian Revolution of 1956 broke out.
In Paris, he met his future wife and artistic soulmate Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon - with whom he later formed the inseparable artistic duo “Christo”- upon the delivery of a portrait he had made of her mother.
With Jeanne-Claude, his work took another dimension and he quickly dismissed painting to focus solely on stacking, wrapping and obscuring surfaces and objects. The couple soon began collaborating together on monumental scale environmental wrappings; Christo would sketch and conceptualise and Jeanne-Claude would enable their conception in the physical world.
By wrapping objects, and later altering entire landscapes, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work questions their very nature our relationship to them. Christo’s approach to art was unique in multiple ways, he was never signed to a gallery and was the sole commissioner of all his works which he funded by selling the sketches of his future installations.
L’Arc de Triomphe,Wrapped sketches on sale at the 2020 BRAFA
Christo’s L’Arc de Triomphe,Wrapped installation is now rescheduled to September MMXXI as a posthume tribute to the late artists’ body of work.
justwaitingforradiantday.
check the CITRUS prelude
The Pont Alexandre III
World Exhibitions effectively contribute to the construction of cities and to their international aura. What do the Eiffel Tower, the Grand Palais and the Pont Alexandre iii have in common? They were all inaugurated in the context of a World Exhibition and still greatly contribute to Paris’ prestige by continuously attracting millions of local and foreign visitors everyday.
The pont Alexandre iii, situated between the Invalides and the GrandParis and named after the Russian Tsar Alexandre iii was completed in 1900 and was to represent the Franco-Russian alliance in a complicated diplomatic context with the German Empire.
Enjoy a casual day on the Pont Alexandre iii:
The arched bridge is not only one of the most beautiful in Paris to this day, it also represents one that required great innovative technical abilities to build at the time. The architects and engineers comissioned at the time had been instructed to find a way to design a continous river-crossing that was to follow the Champs Elysées’ axis right up to the Invalides Esplanade without obstructing its view.
Seventeen artists collaborated on the decorative programme of this splendid bridge. In the center of the arch, the nymph of Seine and Neva river continues to symbolise the friendship between the two countries, which maintained their alliance 14 years after the first World War.
Due to covid-19, the next World Exhibition: the Dubai Expo 2020 has been postponed to 2021 and will be held from October 1st 2021 - March 31st 2022.
the Angle(L) And(W) the Curve(J) in the grandparis by André Chami
Built and inaugurated in Paris for the MCMXXXVIII Universal Exhibition, the Palais de Tokyo’s function as a museum has evolved over the years to become not only an avant-guard space for contemporary art but also a social hub for creatives.
Currently, after seventy seven years of existence in the public space, Alfred Janniot’s two-sided bas relief framework ‘Legend of the Sea’ and ‘Legend of the Earth’ is being restored.
Since the 1990’s the Palais de Tokyo’s forecourt and Janniot’s large sandy-coloured carved frescos have hosted generations of skateboarders who come to enjoy the space’s aesthetic vastness and tranquility at the heart of the city.
For the 2015 Wool Week, curator André Chami and LWJ designed a performative art piece on the Palais de Tokyo’s forecourt to capture skateboarders’ repetitive pattern thanks to a giant printing machine archiving their movements onto ink on square pieces of wool.
The concave trajectories of the skateboarders activity on delimited squares of wool perfectly embodies the essence of LWJ - the angle(L) and(W) the curve(J).
The overall performance was accompanied by a live synesthetic acoustic piece by artists Luca Ventimiglia and Victor Nebbiolo Di Castri. Enjoy watching the piece here:
As a tribute to matter in the digital age, we chose Alfred Janniot’s timeless sculptural fresco as the backdrop for our CITRUS prelude curation photo shoot. This unlocked LWJ’s printed 3x3m blue-ink on wool artworks created in MMXV.
Continue your exploration with:
one of the eighth printed wool sheet
