Artist: Christo

Gagosian presents an exhibition in the Burlington Arcade gallery featuring original works by Christo related to site-specific projects—both realized and unrealized—by him and Jeanne-Claude. The presentation opens on the same day as Christo: Air, at the Grosvenor Hill gallery, which brings together rare early works by Christo with a large-scale indoor installation originally conceived by the artists in 1968 for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia.

Christo’s drawings and collages were vital to the aesthetic and technical development of his and Jeanne-Claude’s many monumental installations, and he borrowed from the presentational style of architectural renderings to clarify how these undertakings would ultimately appear. These original works also have particular significance as documents of structures that only ever existed for brief periods and in specific, sometimes remote, locations. Once a given public work was realized, the artist made no further studies of it; he did, however, produce numerous silkscreen, offset, and digital prints detailing plans that remained unbuilt.

The drawings on view at Burlington Arcade include Wrapped Vestibule (Project for the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney) (1990) and Wrapped Floors and Stairway and Covered Windows (Project for Palazzo Bricherasio, Turin) (1998). Wrapped Vestibule transformed its venue’s entrance into an arena of concealment and revelation by swathing its columns, sculptures, and floor in white fabric bound with rope. Introducing Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s long-standing use of wrapping into a neoclassical interior, it disrupted visitors’ experience of the museum’s institutional space, allowing its architecture, history, and function to reemerge as both forms and subjects. Wrapped Floors reconfigured the seventeenth-century wing of Palazzo Bricherasio in a similar way; here, the artists used approximately 1,188 square meters of cotton drop cloth to cover the parquet floors of five rooms and their connecting staircases. As visitors traversed the palazzo, the fabric’s shifting textures lent its architecture a destabilizing fluidity.

Among the editioned prints on view are several lithographs, including The Pont Alexandre III, Wrapped, Project for Paris (1991); and Wrapped Roman Sculptures, Project for Die Glyptothek, München (1991). These prints incorporate collaged fabric, thread, twine, staples, photographs, and masking tape, giving them a highly textural object-like quality. Also on view is a screenprint, The Mastaba, 1,240 Oil Barrels, Project for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia (1998), which may be familiar to London audiences since it represents a structure related to Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s temporary sculpture The London Mastaba, Serpentine Lake, Hyde Park (2016–18).

Coinciding with the exhibition, the Gagosian Shop is hosting a Christo takeover featuring four sculptures—Wrapped Books (1962), Wrapped Magazines (1962), Wrapped Telephone (1963), and Wrapped Magazines “MAX” (1994)—as well as a selection of books tracing the artist’s oeuvre from his early works to the monumental projects he realized with Jeanne-Claude.