Christo and Jeanne-Claude are one of the most well-known and innovative artist duos in art history. They created monumental environmental artworks that transformed landscapes and urban spaces, and they are most recognized for their large-scale fabric-wrapping works which included wrapping the Berlin Reichstag in Berlin, an Australian coastline, and islands in Florida. Some of these projects would take as much as 20 years to realize with the planning, permits, and other logistical complexities of installations at such a large scale. The duo’s work of monumental importance can be found in the collections of the National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, and more.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude were born on the same day on different continents. On June 13, 1935, Christo was born in Bulgaria and Jeanne-Claude was born to French parents in Morocco. In the late 1950s they started a lifelong artistic and personal partnership in Paris. They accepted no sponsorships, and funded every project through selling of prints, drawings, and fabric from previous installations. Christo explained, “I like to be absolutely free, to be totally irrational with no justification for what I like to do. I will not give up one centimeter of my freedom for anything.”

Across their installation, sculpture, and print work, Christo and Jeanne-Claude used the language of wrapping to capture light and bring attention to the way light strikes form. As Cyril Christo, the artists’ son, writes, “form gave way to light which was given shape, and the wind was given expression, as a mistress of a dream.” The installations, he continues, were a way “to relish the body’s passage through a landscape as an experience,” in contrast to other work in the 1960s which was “representing reality by imitation, an emperor, a religious scene, a still life, a bunch of flowers, a portrait, a nude, simple paint thrown on the canvas. Jeanne-Claude and Christo offered an act of revelation something, of a small engineering marvel, a new aesthetic of liberation.”