Turner Carroll Gallery now represents the Christo and Jeanne-Claude family collection of prints and editioned works
Turner Carroll Gallery is thrilled to announce a major milestone: our gallery is now representing the prints and multiples collection of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. We are delighted to bring our collectors the opportunity to view and collect this stunning, art historically significant work.
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.
(left) Surrounded Islands, 1982, Miami (right) The Pont Neuf Wrapped, 1985, Paris
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.”
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.”
In 2026, Turner Carroll Gallery will have an exhibition of both works by Christo and Jeanne-Claude and creative process materials from their long legacy, including the actual cloth that was used in their wrapping works, much from the archive of Jack Lemon’s Landfall Press Archives. Jack Lemon was the first printmaker to master the combination of 3D wrapped work and lithograph that Christo and Jeanne-Claude were seeking. As art historians, we are so grateful for the opportunity to connect two archives and provide a more complete picture of the impact of Christo and Jeanne-Claude on contemporary art, performance art, and sculpture and print.
Author: Sophie Carroll