Christo

(1935 - 2020)

Galleria L'Elefante Arte Contemporanea, Treviso, as from stamps on the reverse and stamp on photography of the artwork;

Private collection, Rome

Exhibitions:

Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Over The River. A Work in Progress, Fremont Art Center, Cañon City, Colorado, USA, from July 5 to August 27, 2006

Photograph of the artwork authenticated by the artist

Blindarte kindly thanks to Mathias Koddenberg of the Christo Archive, Berlin, for his help in compiling this card

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The work presented here is the famous project entitled "Over the River" executed in 2006 by Christo (Gabrovo, 1935 - New York, 2020) to cover the Arkansas River in Colorado through about 10 km of silver and bright fabric panels to hang high above the river bed. In August 1992, 1993 and 1994, searching for a site for the project, Christo, Jeanne-Claude and their team traveled over 22,000 kilometers in the rocky mountains in the United States. On these trips, the team studied eighty-nine rivers in seven American states. Initially six were selected: after visiting them all again in 1996, Christo chose the Arkansas River. However, the project was never realized because of a series of delays that led the artist to abandon it.

Christo is one of the world’s leading representatives of Land Art. His practice of "packing" monuments or entire landscapes, modifying the appearance of places, has made him famous all over the world. Packaging for Christo is an act of appropriation of the object, a conceptual operation dictated by a deep reflection on the nature of things that are charged with a sense of estrangement and mystery when they are hidden from view in whole or only partially. In fact, the artist continually stated: «when everyone knows how an object looks, usually this means that people have stopped noticing it». Hiding them, Christo changes the nature of objects and places, but also the way they are looked at: by hiding the subject from our gaze, paradoxically he highlights it even more through a negative process that emphasizes its lack, deprivation, disappearance, which is the opposite of appearance. (from "Christo, the artist who packaging the world has revolutionized our sense of freedom", by Jennifer Guerra, The Vision, 1 June 2020).