Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Barrels

Christo and Jeanne-Claude are renowned above all for their ephemeral yet monumental interventions in landscapes and cities. Fabric is a defining feature of their projects; they use it to wrap, conceal and otherwise manipulate our visual perception of the world. They have created numerous oil barrel sculptures and installations since the beginning of their careers, though these are less well known. This book is dedicated to these barrel creations, a niche portion of two great artists’ ouevre.
In the late 1950s, Christo started to wrap used oil drums which he had found on scrapyards or bought cheaply at recycling sites. Later, he began piling the untreated oil drums to form ever larger structures. The largest project of this kind to date is a giant sculpture made up of 410,000 oil barrels in the desert of the United Arab Emirates. The project has been developing since 1977; ever since the death of Jeanne-Claude in 2009, Christo has continued it on his own.
This book, published to accompany a large exhibition at Fondation Maeght in the south of France, shows many photos as well as images of drawings and collages, some of which have never been published before. They offer a comprehensive insight into Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s oil barrel projects. Significantly, it contains a detailed documentation of a sculpture specially created by Christo for the famous Giacometti courtyard at Fondation Maeght.
Exhibition: 4 June – 27 November 2016, Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France.