Christo
Christo (born in 1935 in Gabrovo in Bulgaria but with first a French then an American career) is internationally famous with his wife Jeanne-Claude for his environmental works, but they derive from a procedure which he first used for small objects. They were in fact wrapped objects that he began to produce at the end of the ‘50s, in his Parisian period when he adhered to Nouveau Réalisme. Wrapped and tied, the tools become primordial elements, formless embryos of possible objects, stimulators of questions and doubts. It was the extension, the expansion of this method on an environmental scale which was to lead him to wrap monuments and buildings, valleys and cliffs, thus becoming one of the main artists of Land Art, the trend within which he produced some of his main masterpieces: the wrapping of the Monument to Victor Emanuel II in Milan and of the Reichstag of Berlin, of the Australian coast of Little Bay, the Valley Curtain in Colorado, a cloth barrier stretched across the whole of the valley. In Italy we saw him recently in 2016, where he created the large floating jetty on the Lake of Iseo, visited by 1,200,000 people. Soon he will be on the scene in Europe again with the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in the autumn of this year.
His values are always fairly high. This also allows him to create a self-supporting economic system for the making of the large environmental installations. In fact he usually proceeds by making drafts of many of the future projects on paper, and these are sold on the market and form a budget for the production of the environmental work. Thus in most cases there is a clear separation in Christo’s works: the large environmental works are obviously unsellable, while the projects, mostly drawings and photographs with sketches and notes, are put on the market. His market is stable and very safe, with values on the constant increase.
