Christo

Arte e Arte, Bologna
Fino al 17 Febbraio

None of Christo’s works—not even the largest and most expensive ones—are intended to be permanent. Once dismantled or destroyed, they disappear forever, leaving behind them documentary evidence on an industrial scale. For Christo, the planning of each work is the basis around which his work is constructed. Only through his collage-drawings is it possible to reconstruct the creative development of each individual piece.

This exhibition in Bologna is revealing in that it reconstructs the artist’s career through an examination of fifteen original projects, subdivided into three distinct groups. The first is characterized by Christo’s Wrapped works—his original parceled creations. In this category the most notable, for their formal beauty and metaphysical sensuality, were the monument to Vittorio Emanuele II (1970) in the Piazza Duomo, Milan, and that to Christopher Columbus (1975) in the port of Barcelona.

The second group, somewhat more refined and visionary, is represented by the enormous mountains of petrol drums, such as One Million Stacked Oil Drums (1970), in the Galvecton area of Houston (Texas) and Otterlo Mastaba (1979) at the Müller Museum of Otterlo (Holland).

The final works pertain to the Curtain series, huge synthetic fabric curtains that, by means of spatial divisions, change our perception of the landscape, such as Valley Curtain (1970-1972) in Rifle (Colorado) and The Gates (1981) for Central Park, New York. Evident in the project Surrounded Islands (1983), carried out in Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami (Florida), is the hand of his partner and collaborator Jeanne-Claude (the fabric, for example, is shocking pink). The result is a hybrid form of the Wrapped works.




Stefano Gualdi
Translation by Rosalind Furness