ART CITIES:London-Christo

Christo and Jeanne-Claude were known for creating monumental, temporary public artworks that transformed landscapes using everyday materials. Their ambitious projects required years of planning yet existed only briefly before being dismantled and recycled. Christo met Jeanne-Claude in Paris in 1958, and together they moved from producing wrapped objects and assemblages to orchestrating large-scale environmental works spanning parks, cities, and coastlines. Their decades-long collaboration combined artistic vision, engineering, and public participation.

By Efi Michalarou
Photo: Gagosian Archive

In the exhibition “Air”, the legacy of Christo and Jeanne-Claude is reconsidered through one of the most elusive and essential elements in their artistic vocabulary: air itself. Bringing together rare early works and the first realization of a monumental unrealized installation conceived in 1968, the exhibition traces the conceptual origins of a practice that would later transform coastlines, bridges, public monuments, and entire landscapes.

At the center of the exhibition is “Air Package on a Ceiling”, a monumental suspended structure originally designed for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia but never executed due to technical limitations at the time. Now realized for the first time in collaboration with the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, the installation occupies the gallery as both sculpture and atmosphere: internally illuminated, sixteen meters long and ten meters wide, it descends just above the viewer’s head, compelling movement beneath and around its immense hovering form. Neither object nor architecture, the work transforms the space into an immersive field of perception.

The exhibition reveals how Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s fascination with wrapping emerged not merely as an aesthetic gesture, but as a philosophical inquiry into visibility, containment, and experience. During the 1960s, the artists began sealing air inside transparent polyethylene packages bound with rope, creating works in which an invisible substance became materially present. These intimate experiments proposed a radical inversion of sculptural logic: value resided not in the object itself, but in the temporary act of enclosing and framing space. In retrospect, these early “air packages” foreshadow the monumental environmental interventions that would later define the artists’ careers.

Throughout the exhibition, ephemerality functions as both material condition and conceptual strategy. The works resonate strongly with the phenomenological thinking of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose writings described perception as a lived and constantly shifting encounter with the world. Rather than presenting fixed forms, Christo and Jeanne-Claude create situations in which meaning emerges through bodily movement, scale, light, and duration. Air—formless, invisible, and unstable—becomes the ideal medium through which to explore these questions.

Archival material accompanying the installation offers a rare insight into the artists’ process. Original models, preparatory drawings, and collages document the evolution of “Air Package on a Ceiling (Project for the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia)” from an autonomous balloon-like volume into its final suspended configuration. These documents reveal the degree to which engineering, experimentation, and imagination operated together within the duo’s practice.

The second gallery shifts from atmosphere to object with “Wrapped Automobile—Volvo, Model PV-544” (1981), exhibited publicly for the first time in three decades. Originally owned by Serge De Bloe, a close friend and art dealer of the artists, who was acquiring a new vehicle but didn’t want to see the old one—about which he felt sentimental—destroyed. He asked Christo to wrap the car as an artwork, which the artist did in a Brussels body shop prior to exhibiting the work in Berlin. A related work, “Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon” (1963–2014), is currently on view at the Neue Nationalgalerie, Berlin.

Seen together, the works in “Air” illuminate the continuity between the artists’ intimate studio experiments and their later monumental public projects. Long before wrapping buildings or coastlines, Christo and Jeanne-Claude were already investigating how temporary interventions could alter perception, suspend familiarity, and make absence tangible. This exhibition returns to those origins, presenting air not as emptiness, but as material, monument, and experience.

Photo: Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Air Package on a Ceiling (Project for the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia) (detail), 1968, Wood, paint, polyethylene, Mylar, twine, screws, and electric light, 17 x 27 1/2 x 27 1/8 inches (43.2 x 69.9 x 68.9 cm), © Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, Photo: Prudence Cuming Associates Ltd, Courtesy Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation and Gagosian

Info: Gagosian, 20 Grosvenor Hill, London, United Kingdom, Duration: 21/5-21/8/2026, Days & Hours: Tue-Sat 10:00-18:00, https://gagosian.com/