Christo and Jeanne-Claude 1958-2013
| Organized by | Miyanomori International Museum of Art, Sapporo NPO CAPSS |
|---|---|
| Supported By | Sapporo City Sapporo Board of Education |
| In Collaboration With | Masahiko Yanagi |
| Venue | Miyanomori International Museum of Art, Sapporo, Miyanomori Museum Garden, 2-2-1, Miyanomori 2-jo 11-chome, Chuo-ku, Sapporo |
| Inquiries | 011-612-3562 |
Exhibited Works
- Wrapped Cans and Bottles, 1958-59
- Wrapped Telephones, 1962
- Valley Curtains, Colorado, Rifle Project, Collage, 1971
- Wrapped Pont Neuf, Paris project, Collage on Two Sheets, 1985
- The Gates, a Project for Central Park, New York City, Drawing, 2005
- Umbrella, Japan-United States, 1984-91, photograph
- Wrapped Building, Project for Times Square #1, Print with Collage, 2003
More than 50 works in total, including wrapped objects, drawings, collages, multiples, etc.
Miyanomori International Museum of Art, Sapporo: Major works including new collections all on view
Miyanomori International Museum of Art, Sapporo is pleased to present an exhibition of Christo and Jeanne-Claude.
Born in Bulgaria on June 13, 1935, Christo studied at the National Academy of Art Sofia under the Communist regime. While studying abroad in Prague, he was deeply impressed by the innovative works of Picasso, Miro, and others that he was able to see secretly. He then arrived in Paris in search of freedom of expression, where he met Jeanne-Claude (born in Morocco to French parents; passed away in 2009), who was born on the same day and month of the same year, and began working together with her.
Their original ideas became reality with Stacked Oil Barrels and Dockside Packages (’61), which utilized drums and cargo from the port of Cologne, and The Wall of Oil Barrels—Iron Curtain (’62), in which a wall of drums blocked off a street in the city of Paris. As their earliest works, they became the starting point for subsequent large-scale projects such as public monuments, building packaging, and the Mastaba, a pile of hundreds of thousands to hundreds of thousands of oil drums.
From the ’70s onward, the idea of using cloth took a new turn. The orange Valley Curtain (’72), Running Fence (’76), which stretches 40 km long, Surrounded Islands (’83), which is set in a bay dotted with 11 small islands, Umbrellas (’91), which bloomed simultaneously in both Japan and the U.S., Umbrellas (’91), with a total of 3,100 8-meter-diameter trees that bloomed simultaneously in both Japan and the U.S., and the 7,503 Gates (’05) that line N.Y. Central Park, all took many years from conception to realization, including obtaining permits and making technical and material preparations. The creative artworks, which took many years and a huge amount of money to create from conception to realization, were greeted with surprise and admiration by people all over the world. These works, which instantly transform the landscape and disappear in a short period of time, are the very forms of JOY and BEAUTY that the artists themselves have repeatedly talked about and pursued.
MIYANOMORI ART MUSEUM, SAPPORO and CAPSS, a non-profit organization, have been collecting and permanently exhibiting artworks and cooperating with exhibitions and publications outside of Hokkaido to introduce artists in Japan for some time.
This exhibition will feature almost all of the major works under the name Christo and Jeanne-Claude, focusing on drawings created by Christo during the conception and preparation stages of the projects, as well as documentary photographs of the realized projects, including the large-scale indoor installation Big Air Package that was exhibited in Germany last year, and two ongoing projects. It will also feature precious early works by Christo such as Wrapped Cans and Bottles and Package. We will explore the full range of the artists’ unique creation and its appeal.