Christo was born in 1935 in Gabrovo, Bulgaria. He has worked alone, and with his wife Jeanne-Claude after they met in 1958, in producing a great variety of works across many different media including installation, sculptures, drawings and prints. He studied painting, sculpture and stage design at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia. He also studied sculpture at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna. It was in 1958 that he settled in Paris and began his wrapping projects, at first starting on a small scale with such items as books and wine bottles, then cars and bicycles. The items he wrapped were transformed into aesthetic objects- suggestions of their actual form and function. His large scale outdoor works, all completed in partnership with his wife are a very important part of his work, with the drawings, collages, scale models and prints acting as essential parts of the working process.

Christo and Jean-Claude’s art changes people’s experience of the landscape, specific structures, buildings, or even islands, to temporarily transform and redefine the way we look at it thereafter. Both artists are renowned for their wrapping projects, perhaps most famously – the large scale wrapping of the Pont Neuf, Paris (1975-85) and the Reichstag, Berlin (1971-95). Christo and Jean-Claude achieved an extraordinary visual effect in the Reichstag project, with the silvery fabric, pleated and draped over the imposing structure completely transforming its aesthetic. This act of wrapping functions as a means of portraying their preciousness, encasing a building or monument paradoxically draws our attention to it, making us think about its importance, which we often take for granted. These monumental projects also draw our attention to the freedom of making art, defying boundaries of scale, and location.

Christo’s prints, which often have collage elements mimicking the materials used in the large scale wrapping projects, act as more permanent works of art in contrast to the fleeting nature of his ‘environmental works’. Christo has art works in many major Museum Collections Internationally including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, New York City, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, Moderna Museet, Stockholm , Nationalgalerie, Berlin, Museum of Contemporary Art, Tokyo, and many more.