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New Brussels show celebrates remarkable works of artist Christo

22:52 02/11/2017
Major retrospective at ING Art Centre celebrates an artist who, at 82, is still busy creating to this day

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's art installations have enthralled a worldwide public for decades. The wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin, the wrapping of the Pont Neuf in Paris, the installation of the Gates in New York’s Central Park were all monumental projects but also ephemeral. They created an exquisite tension between the massively solid and the temporary and people were able to immerse themselves in each installation because of the free access provided by the artists.

How were they able to take over large public spaces, construct elaborate installations and offer the experience free to the public? By maintaining complete control of their projects, from conception through execution by refusing any grants, licensing, or donations of any kind, even donated labour. Instead they sold the preparatory works, that is the sketches and scale models of each project, and early works from the 1950s and 1960s, to art collectors. They also paid the municipalities where the installations were created for the "rental" of the space. For instance, to produce the Gates is Central Park they paid the City of New York $3 million.

The New York installation came 40 years after Christo first set foot in the city. "I arrived in 1964 in Manhattan. I did not choose to move to NYC," he recalls. "When I escaped from the Soviet bloc, from Czechoslovakia, I was speaking only Russian and Bulgarian, I was alone, no parents, no brother, no sister, a very difficult time.

"I became a political refugee, I lost my nationality and I was stateless for 17 years, between 1957 and 1973. When I first arrived in the West, I did all sorts of odd jobs to survive, washing cars in garages, dishes in restaurants, I had no time to learn English or French. Even today I cannot write in English, I cannot write in French.

"I lived in Europe between 1958 and 1964 mostly in Paris - but all the time I was terribly handicapped by my extremely poor communication. Living in Paris, to be an artist and have a studio was terribly complicated. Then suddenly I found that in Manhattan I can have a big place for $70. In 1964 it was a lot of money but still a nice place to do my work in a simple way. Myself and Jeanne-Claude, we found that this is the only way we could survive."

The current show at the ING Art Centre, entitled Christo and Jeanne-Claude – Urban Projects consists mostly of their preparatory works. There are drawings by Christo showing what the project will look like and there are scale models, some table sized such as a model of the wrapped Reichstag, others quite large such as the model of the wrapped Pont Neuf which fills an entire room. Some of the projects such as Surrounded Islands in Biscayne Bay might not seem to be urban but they do qualify since they are in the middle of a major metropolitan area.

Christo recalls his connection to Brussels: "I remember the Atomium very well. When I arrived in Paris, in 1958, there was the World's Fair in Brussels. I took the train and spent two or three days in Brussels. I remember the exhibition of 20th century art by André Malraux. And there was exhibition of the Congo Belge and I was absolutely flabbergasted that all the Congo once belonged to one man, the king. There was great African art in that exhibition, beautiful."

Wolfgang Volz has been the official photographer of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects for decades and the exhibition ends in the basement of the ING Art Centre with, projected on three wall-sized LED screens, hundreds of his photos. They vividly capture the beauty and otherworldliness of the projects and are a great conclusion to the show.

"Looking back on all these projects it is like a journey," Christo concludes. "Getting permission, meeting people, creating friends, finally doing the new project. I cannot think about the Running Fence in California without thinking of the enormous amount of people who became friends. It’s the connection to landowners, to the workers, all that is so rich in human experience."

What’s next? At 82 years old, Christo is realising a project that he and Jeanne-Claude first imagined in 1977. called Mastaba. It will be his first permanent installation. A mastaba was a tomb for pharaohs and other dignitaries of the first two dynasties, made of mud brick and rectangular in plan with sloping sides and a flat roof. Christo’s version is much larger in scale being 150m high (one and a half Atomiums tall) and will be constructed out of 410,000 multicoloured petroleum barrels in the desert of Abu Dhabi.

The ING show includes screenings of two Maysles Brothers documentaries, one on the wrapping of the Pont Neuf in Paris and one on Umbrellas, the project which decorated valleys in California with yellow umbrellas and Japan with blue umbrellas.

Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Urban Projects, until 25 February 2018, ING Art Centre

Written by Richard Harris

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