SMART THINKING

Christo, the artist best known for enveloping public buildings, has left an incredible legacy.

Christo, the artist known for wrapping public buildings, has left a huge legacy.

Christo, the Bulgarian-born artist best known for his temporary installations based on wrapping the exteriors of landmark buildings, bridges and outdoor spaces, escaped from then-Communist Bulgaria in 1957. A year later he moved to Paris, where he met his wife and art partner, Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon. In 2018, he presented ‘The London Mastaba’, as pictured, a 20m-high sculpture of an ancient Egyptian tomb, made from 7506 red, white and mauve barrels put on a platform in a lake in London’s Hyde Park. Christo, who died in May, and Jeanne-Claude, who died in 2009, are also known for such works as ‘The Gates’ – a 2005 installation in New York’s Central Park, and the wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin in 1995 in a vast silvery curtain. Closer to home, in 1969, the artist wrapped Little Bay in Sydney in polyweave tied with polypropylene rope. For ‘The Floating Piers’, completed in northern Italy in 2016, and the culmination of his dream “to walk on water”, he used more than 3km of saffron fabric to create a pedestrian walkway connecting two small islands in Lake Iseo to the mainland. His latest project, which will still take place this September, is wrapping the Arc de Triomphe in Paris in 25,000m2 of recyclable polypropylene fabric in silvery blue and 7000m of red rope. He may have gone, but the majesty of his community artwork will always be remembered.