Christo

Biography

Christo Javacheff was born in Gabrovo, Bulgaria on June 13, 1935 to a family of entrepreneurial origins. In 1958 he moved to Paris where he met Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon who became his wife in the same year. In 1958 Javacheff Christo joined the Nouveau Réalisme group founded by Pierre Restany. Of this period are his first works such as the "Packages" and the "Wrapped Objects". 1961 marks the beginning on the one hand of the artistic collaboration with his wife Jeanne-Claude and on the other of two important projects: the "Projet d'un édifice public empaqueté" that is the first project of packaging a public building and the "Stacked Oil Barrels" or the accumulation of thousands of barrels of oil at the port of Cologne. In 1964 Javacheff Christo and Jeanne Claude moved to New York. There are many works created by Javacheff Christo in the following years such as "Wrapped Roman Wall", the drapery of a stretch of the ancient Aurelian walls and a Roman gate in Rome; "Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Countries", a kind of Chinese wall north of San Francisco, visible for 24 hours, stretched over 59 private ranches for a length of 39 kilometers and required a design of 42 months; "The Pont Neuf Wrapped", the drapery of the oldest and only double bridge over the Seine in Paris made with 40,876 square meters of champagne-colored woven polyamide and 13 km of ropes; "The Umbrellas", a work that involved the installation of 1340 blue umbrellas in Ibaraki on the coasts of Japan and 1760 yellow umbrellas on those of California in the United States, each umbrella was 6 meters high with a diameter of 8.7 meters. In 1992 Javacheff Christo ventured a project, still not realized today , "Over the River" or the proposal to cover, with a succession of fabric panels supported by steel cables, of an 11-kilometer stretch of the Arkansas River in Colorado. Dated 2005 is "The Gates" installation, inside Central Park in New York, of a pedestrian path marked by 7503 doors, placed at a constant distance, from which descend colored sheets suspended two meters from the ground. The last work of Javacheff Christo, in order of time, is the walkway on Lake Iseo, The floating piers, covered with tarpaulins that connects Sulzano, on the mainland, to Montisola and then continue to the island of San Paolo and back. The walkway consists of floating crates, anchored together and with the seabed, with a total width of fourteen meters and a length of 4.5 km. The work was inaugurated on June 18, 2016 and closed the following July 3 then for the usual duration of two weeks. Christo died in New York on May 31, 2020 of natural causes while he was working on the project of the packaging of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris.

As with all artists who have their own strong stylistic code, one wonders what was the source of inspiration for this gesture of Christ. There are two possible hypotheses, one more land and the other more cultured. The first could be the fascination exerted on Christo child by the darkened windows for the change of furniture; we can imagine what fantasies went through his head trying to guess what the blackout sheets hidden and the silhouettes just mentioned of the window dressers, they were girls or boys, they were beautiful or ugly and so on. This theme fascinated both Christo that that of the windows was one of the first packaging and perhaps the best known, performed in various sizes and colors. For the other hypothesis, the more cultured one, the inspiration may have been "L'enigma d'Isidore Ducasse", a 1920 work by Man Ray. The work consists of a mysterious object, hence the word enigma, packed and tied with string.

Tags: Christo Javacheff - Christo and Jeanne Claude -  Nouveau Réalisme - running fence - the gates - the umbrellas - over the river - the floating piers - the pont neuf wrapped - wrapped roman wall 

Christo - Nouveau Réalisme

The Nouveau Réalisme is an artistic movement founded in Paris on October 27, 1960 by Pierre Restany who brought together under this name a group of artists including Villeglé, Arman, Heins, Klein, Spoerri, Tinguely to which later Christo, Rotella and Niki de Saint-Phalle were added. The group broke into three strands. The members of what he intended to recover in artistic form the language of advertising communication were, Rotella, Villeglè, Dufréne and Deschamps. These were also called Affichisti because the most full-bodied work of these was to remove the billboards that were in the cities and paste them on canvas. Usually these artists glued on the same canvas several layers of billboards that then worked performing tears that were not random but depended on the aesthetic taste of the artist and the message that he wanted to give. Among them was particular Mimmo Rotella, who had the idea of presenting not only the visible part of the torn posters, but also the back part that adhered to the support, land or wall. This is how what he called the Retro d'Affiche were born.