Christo

Christo is a world-renowned artist who creates site-specific temporary environmental works, which have been co-authored with his wife Jeanne-Claude until her death in 2009. Christo and Jeanne-Claude were born on the same day in 1935, and they met in Paris in 1959 where Christo was working as an artist. Associated with the French movement, Nouveau Réalisme, Christo used found objects in his earlier works, wrapping cars or furniture, and slowly advanced to grander scales once he began to collaborate with Jeanne-Claude in 1961, with their covering barrels in the port of Cologne. The couple moved to the United States in 1964 and worked on designing storefronts to fund their grander ambitions. In 1968, the artists were invited to exhibit at documenta 4 in Kassel. Over decades of ideation and bureaucratic management, the artists collaboratively created works unprecedented in scale. Some of their most famous projects include ‘Running Fence’ along the California coast (1976), ‘The Pont Neuf Wrapped’ in Paris (1985), ‘Wrapped Reichstag’ in Berlin (1995), and ‘The Gates’ in New York’s Central Park (2005). Their works are held in the collections of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art; the Musée d’art modern et d’art contemporain, Nice; the Boca Raton Museum of Art; and the Cleveland Museum of Art, among others.