Christo and Jeanne-Claude family collection at the Dallas Art Fair
Next week, April 16 to 19, Turner Carroll Gallery will represent Santa Fe in the Dallas Art Fair at booth F7. We’re bringing you important works by an international selection of blue chip and first time art fair exhibiting artists, listed below. After 14 years at our original booth, we’re shaking it up with a new booth location and fresh design concept. Come view our selection and say hello at booth F7 on the main floor, and let us know if you’ll be joining!
We are incredibly excited to be able to offer collectors works from Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s family collection. 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. 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.
When so many works from an artist’s oeuvre are viewed together, they paint a picture of the evolution of a career and the mind of the artist as a whole. For example, “Wall of Oil Barrles–Iron Curtain, Rue Visconti, Paris” (pictured above) is a print of one of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s earliest collaborations in 1961 (their second ever). As Gagosian writes, this project reflects the magnitude of Christo’s fear of the iron curtain during the Cold War, while the young artist was a recent and passport-less political refugee from Bulgaria.
The “Iron Curtain” project earned the artist duo much acclaim. They started to think big: one of Christo’s dreams became to wrap the Arc de Triomphe in Paris, one of the most prominent symbols of his new home. He made drawings and photomontages of his visions, including “Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped, Project for Paris” (pictured above). Christo and Jeanne-Claude wanted none of their artistic ownership to be diluted, so they financed all of their visions through the sale of these drawings and prints and never accepted sponsorships. Christo’s dream to wrap the Arc de Triomphe became reality posthumously in 2021, the culmination of a career built through decades of increasingly monumental installations.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude steadily gained an international following as they realized their big dreams. One of the pieces they are most well-known for, and which cemented their names as public figures, is “Surrounded Islands,” a project in which they wrapped the coast of Biscayne Bay in Miami. The incredibly complicated project involved consulting with hundreds of local government permitters, marine biologists, and engineers, to enormous acclaim. The Miami Dade Public Library astutely summarizes the goal of Surrounded Islands:
“Surrounded Islands was more than just an aesthetic spectacle; it was a statement about the relationship between art, nature and the urban environment. By transforming these seemingly insignificant islands into works of art, Christo and Jeanne-Claude drew attention to the beauty and fragility of Miami’s Biscayne Bay, encouraging viewers to reevaluate their perceptions of the landscape around them.”
–Miami Dade Public Library
Author: Sophie Carroll