The Gates III, 2005

Javacheff Christo is best known for art projects on a big scale, which involve packaging air, wrapping buildings and making use of natural landscape features. Christo began his career as a social realist painter, after studying at the Fine Arts Academy in Sofia. He then studied stage design in Prague and sculpture in Vienna. After moving to Paris, where he met his wife Jeanne-Claude, he started collaborating with her on many art projects. Javacheff Christo first solo exhibition took place in Cologne in 1961 at the Galerie Haro Lauhus and, as a protest about the existence of the Berlin Wall he and his wife constructed Wall of Oil Barrels (1962). During his time in Paris, he also began to experiment with wrapping objects. In the mid-1960s he began to work on full-scale projects, such model store fronts with screened off windows, and developed the idea of creating air packages. In 1968 he exhibited a 5,600 cubic meter inflated package at Documenta 4 in Kassel. In the late 1960s he began to wrap buildings, starting with the Kunsthalle in Bern and later the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. He went on to wrap features in the environment, such as a mile of Australian coast close to Sydney. In 1972 he created the Valley Curtain as a temporary artwork in the Colorado landscape and in 1976 he designed the Running Fence as a significant piece of temporary environmental art in California. In 1995 his art gained widespread attention around the world when his Wrapped Reichstag featured prominently in the media. For two weeks millions of people went to Berlin to view it. This piece was symbolic of the reunification of Germany, because Jeanne-Claude and Javacheff Christo had first proposed the idea in 1971, and the project was only made possible when the Berlin Wall came down two decades later. (Artist website)