Skip to main content
Collections Menu
Wrapped Walk Ways, Project for St Stephen's Green Park, Dublin
Wrapped Walk Ways, Project for St Stephen's Green Park, Dublin

Wrapped Walk Ways, Project for St Stephen's Green Park, Dublin

Artist (1935 - 2020)
Date1977
MediumFabric, pencil, Photostat from photograph by Wolfgang Volz, charcoal, crayon, pastel, map and four black & white photographs by Wolfgang Volz
DimensionsCollage in two parts: each 71 x 56 cm
ClassificationsCollage
Credit LineCollection & image © Hugh Lane Gallery. Purchased by the Friends of the National Collections of Ireland and Dublin Corporation, 1978. © The Estate of Christo.
Object number1438
DescriptionChristo Javacheff attended the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia from 1953-1956 and the following year briefly studied in Vienna. In 1958 he moved to Paris where he met Jeanne-Claude, who became his wife and artistic collaborator. From his early career Christo sought to provoke new insights into commonplace objects by wrapping them. Initially small in scale, these empaquetages evolved into ambitious projects including wrapping large swathes of coastline and well-known landmarks and buildings. In 1976 Christo was invited to participate in ROSC. Wrapped Walk Ways Project for St. Stephen's Green Park, Dublin is a preparatory work for this unexecuted project, which proposed wrapping paths in St. Stephen's Green with 15,000 square yards of fabric. Christo's work around this time was informed by ceremonial gardens of the Far East, particularly their subtle change of surfaces underfoot. While appearing delicate and ephemeral, Christo intended that people walk on his fabric paths. Deliberately situating these beautiful and challenging projects outside a traditional museum context exposes them to a wider audience and their construction often benefits from the involvement of teams of workers drawn from the local community. Despite the complex logistics involved, these striking works are designed to be strictly temporary. (JO'D)

The philosophy behind this work is that of involving the people in the art work both through the physical planning, making and erecting of the work and also by changing the public's or individual's perception of well-known objects by temporarily transforming them. By partially concealing the object he draws attention to the fundamental form beneath the wrapping.




On View
Not on view
Collections