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.
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