How Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Wrapped Masterpieces Still Captivate the World

The monumental environmental installations of the late husband-and-wife duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude are having a major moment, timed to the 90th anniversary of their births—both artists’ birthdates are June 13, 2025. This year and into 2026, a flurry of major projects and exhibitions are revisiting or paying tribute to their groundbreaking work that transformed not just landscapes but the very definition of public art.

“Ultimately, all the work of art that Christo and Jeanne-Claude did is about freedom. And Christo’s childhood growing up in a Communist Bulgaria had a lot to do with it,” said Vladimir Yavachev, Christo’s nephew and the longtime director of projects for the duo. He now helps run their foundation.

The artists, Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon (1935–2009) and Christo Vladimirov Javacheff (1935–2020), met in 1958 and began working together almost immediately. In 1961, their very first collaborative piece, , featured the main elements that would become the hallmarks of their work. It was a temporary outdoor installation on the harbor in Cologne, Germany, with groups of oil barrels covered by tarps secured with ropes.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude would go on to take this vision to seemingly impossible heights, wrapping entire buildings in fabric—most recently with  in Paris, a piece posthumously realized under Yavachev in 2021. He’s worked on every Christo and Jeanne-Claude project since , a Transpacific installation staged in Ibaraki, Japan, and Southern California in 1991.

“I was underage labor when I started,” Yavachev recalled. He was 17 when he left his native Bulgaria in 1990, and began working with his aunt and uncle.

Now, it is up to him to complete Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s in the Abu Dhabi desert. First conceived in 1977, the piece will be the artists’ only permanent installation and the largest contemporary sculpture in the world—taller than the Great Pyramid of Giza, made from 410,000 multicolored oil barrels.

Marvels of Engineering

But while construction on that long-gestating project has yet to begin, Christo and Jeanne-Claude are perhaps more visible than ever. The artists’ 90th birthday year has proved an apt moment to look back at some of their most famous works, marvels of engineering and visual spectacles that crisscrossed the globe, often taking many years to come to fruition.

Preserving Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s legacy is complicated by the fact that their ambitious projects were designed to be ephemeral. There are early sculptures, drawings, and preparatory works, but the big pieces that made them famous live on only in photographs and memories. They were committed to the works’ temporary nature and transient beauty.

“[Our projects] exist in their time, impossible to repeat,” Christo told Artnet contributor Devorah Lauter just two months before his death. “That is their power, because they cannot be bought, they cannot be possessed… They cannot be seen again.”

The magic of technology is helping change that.

This year also marks the 30th anniversary of the , the 1995 project in which the artists covered a Neo-Renaissance government building in Berlin with silvery fabric. And it’s the 20th anniversary of in New York’s Central Park, which saw 7,503 metal frames draped with orange fabric placed along a pathway of 23 miles.

Both have been resurrected, in a high-tech way.

In Central Park, visitors this February and March could experience the display anew via augmented reality, with the artists’ foundation recreating the dramatic addition to the park landscape digitally in the Bloomberg Connects app. (An accompanying exhibition was held at the Shed in Hudson Yards.)

“People’s reaction was very similar to when they actually saw the project in real life.
So that was very, very nice,” Yavachev said.

Currently, in Berlin, the artists’ foundation is using digital projection to rewrap the Reichstag every night until June 20. The project requires some 30 projectors with a collective 1.2 million lumens, and features an animation of the silvery fabric unfurling over the building’s façade, which had to be digitally mapped for the occasion.

“It’s a little challenging because there are a lot of windows,” Yavachev said. The original piece involved fabricating 70 tailor-made fabric panels, installed by a team of 90 trained rock climbers.

“Of course you cannot replace the real feel of the fabric and the wind,” he said. “This is a way to commemorate the project and as well to introduce young people to Christo and Jean’s work.”

Exhibitions Galore

There are also currently a slew of Christo and Jeanne-Claude exhibitions doing just that. That includes a permanent exhibition with documentation from at Berlin’s Deutscher Bundestag, the home of the German parliament. A preparatory work for , featuring a collaged photograph and drawing, was acquired by Bulgaria’s National Gallery in February, and will go on view at the museum on June 24.

The Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin is also getting on the celebration for , having added Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s to its permanent collection display this week. (The work was also shown in Art Basel’s Unlimited section in 2024.)

The artists made the original version of the work in 1964, but had to quickly unwrap the vehicle at the request of the car owner who lent it for the exhibition.

“He later said that it was the biggest mistake of his life,” Yavachev said—the young car owner wanted to be able to drive his car, but it would have proved considerably more valuable if it had remained an artwork. But Christo returned to the idea in 2014, buying the same model year car as he had the first time around to recreate the work permanently.

“The fabric is really thick, so it has great folds,” Yavachev added. “It’s a beautiful work. It just looks really, really good. And it’s almost like a shrunken version of one of the larger [wrapped structures].”

There are also larger Christo and Jeanne-Claude shows at museums that have received generous gifts from the artists and their foundation connected to their projects. Works connected to , Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 1983 work outlining 11 islands in Biscayne Bay with pink polypropylene fabric, were gifted to the NSU Art Museum, in 2024, and are currently on view in a dedicated exhibition.

And later this month, the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Mo., will unveil the foundation’s gift from , a 1978 project in a local park creating 2.7 miles of pathways traced in saffron-colored fabric.

The biggest outing is “Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Wrapped. Tied. Stacked. Würth Collection,” a 60-year retrospective featuring over 120 works at the Würth Museum in Künzelsau, Germany. The museum has one of the largest collections of the artists’ work in the world, thanks to founder Reinhold Würth’s close friendship with the couple.

“Christo and Jeanne-Claude undoubtedly shifted the dimension of what had been conceivable as a work of art until then. Their boldness to wrap a building or monument, or surround an entire coast, did not change the world, but how we see it,” museum director C. Sylvia Weber, who co-curated the show, said in a statement, calling their work “a celebration of the moment.”

Artist Tributes

Other artists are also paying tribute to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and how their wrapped structures created moments of mystery in everyday environments, igniting the imagination.

In April, Ibrahim Mahama (b. 1987) wrapped the exterior of the Kunsthalle Bern in jute sackcloth ahead of the renovated institution’s reopening this month. The Ghanaian artist has wrapped buildings before, like the Barbican in London in 2024, but this is his most overt homage to Christo and Jeanne-Claude.

The duo had memorably covered the building for their project (1967–68). Mahama’s take on the piece used a material tied to colonial history and the export of African goods, while referring back to the original installation.

“It was actually the first time that Christo and Jean Claude wrapped a public building—that had never happened before,
such a serious intervention,” Yavachev said. “It’s amazing that it paved the way for young artists to do many other things, so it’s great.”

The foundation wasn’t involved in Mahama’s project, but welcomes the creation of new work inspired by Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s projects.

“Any artist can do anything they want.
That’s the beauty about art,” Yavachev said.

He actually personally reached out to the French artist JR (b. 1983) to help set in motion another forthcoming Christo and Jeanne-Claude tribute, titled : “I’ve known him for many years and I know he’s very inspired by Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work.”

The piece pays homage to , a 1985 project in which Christo and Jeanne-Claude wrapped Paris’s oldest bridge in silky, light golden-brown fabric. JR plans to tap into the city’s architectural history by installing a photographic display of the rocky outcroppings formed at the stone quarries that provided the raw materials to build Paris.

He’s re-envisioning Pont Neuf as a grotto, its arches and parapets obscured by the full-scale black and white photos of the large rock formations that celebrate the natural elements that contribute so much to the beauty of the city.

The technical details of the JR project are still under wraps (no pun intended), but when I asked if the photos would be affixed to some kind of armature, Yavachev said that it would be “more like an inflatable technology.”

In true Christo and Jeanne-Claude fashion, the new installation is actually getting pushed back to 2026. Their works were so logistically complex that it could take decades to finally bring their vision to life. took 24 years to finish.  took 26. So what’s one more year waiting to celebrate the 40th anniversary of ?

In the meantime, the foundation is partnering with Paris City Hall to stage a public art installation on the banks of the River Seine, near Pont Neuf, presenting a brief history of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Paris projects.

“The nice thing about public art is that it confronts people who are usually not interested in art with art,” Yavachev said. “If you go to a gallery or to a museum, you’re already interested to end up there.
But with public art, you can’t miss it. And as Christo used to say, whether they hate it or love it, it’s OK, because at the end of the day, they just talk about art.”

The Wrapped Reichstag (Project for Berlin, 1971–95)

Wrapped Volkswagen Beetle Saloon

Source: Exhibition - news.artnet.com