Christo

Born in Gabrova, Bulgaria in 1935, Christo Javacheff first trained at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia from 1953-56. He then studied in Vienna at the Academy of Art before moving to Paris in 1958. Here he became a co-founder of the magazine KWY. He found initial success as an artist with his empaquetages, sculptures of packed and wrapped everyday objects. This project found public recognition in the late 1950s through the assemblage of oil drums he erected in public places, most notably his Iron Curtain-Wall of Oil Drums which blocked the Rue Visconti, Paris in 1962. Early in his career his 'packages' were constructed using small-scale objects but he soon progressed to larger items such as entire buildings and tracts of land. The motivating factor behind this progression was the political environmentalism at play in his native Bulgaria, in which the state would wrap unsightly objects along the route of the Orient Express to make the country appear more prosperous to travellers. Among Christo's most awe-inspiring works have been his one million square feet of Wrapped Coast Line in Little Bay Australia of 1969 and most famously, his Surrounded Islands project (1980-83), which involved surrounding eleven islands in Biscayne Bay, Miami with a 200 foot radius of floating pink fabric.

Reference: Images and Insights Exh. Cat. (Hugh Lane Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, Dublin 1993), 276.