Javacheff christo

Biography

Christo Javacheff was born in Gabrovo, Bulgaria on June 13, 1935 to a family of entrepreneurial origins. From 1953 until 1956 he completed his studies at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia. In 1965 Javacheff Christo stayed in Prague for six months and the following year completed a semester of study at the Vienna Academy of Fine Arts. In 1958 he moved to Paris where he came into contact with a particularly significant artistic reality and where he met Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon who became his wife in the same year. In 1958 Javacheff Christo joined the Nouveau Réalisme group founded by Pierre Restany. From this period are his first works such as the "Packages" and the "Wrapped Objects". The 1961 marked the beginning on the one hand of the artistic collaboration with his wife Jeanne-Claude and on the other of two important projects: the "Projet d'un édifice public empaqueté" that is the first project of packing a public building and the "Stacked Oil Barrels" or the accumulation of thousands of barrels of oil at the port of Cologne. In 1964, Javacheff Christo and Jeanne Claude moved to New York City. Two years later they created "Air Package" work consisting of a suspended air pack and "Wrapped Tree" that is a tree packed at the Stedelijk van Abbemuseum in Eindhoveen in the Netherlands. Many are the works made by Javacheff Christo in later years as "Wrapped Roman Wall", the draping of a stretch of the ancient Aurelian walls and a Roman gate in Rome; "Running Fence, Sonoma and Marin Countries", a kind of Chinese wall in the northern of San Francisco, visible for 24 hours, spaned 59 private ranches for a length of 39 kilometers and required a 42-month design; "The Pont Neuf Wrapped", the drapery of the oldest and only double bridge on the Seine in Paris made with 40,876 square meters of champagne-colored woven polyamides and 13 km of ropes; "The Umbrellas", a work that included the installation of 1340 blue umbrellas in Ibaraki on the coast of Japan and 1760 yellow umbrellas on those of California in the United States, each umbrella was 6 meters high with a diameter of 8.7 meters. In 1992, Javacheff Christo ventured a project yet not carried out "Over the River" that is the proposed roofing, with a succession of fabric panels supported by steel cables, of an 11-kilometer stretch of the Arkansas River in Colorado. Dated 2005 is "The Gates" installation, inside New York's Central Park, of a pedestrian path marked by 7503 doors, placed at a constant distance, from which descend colored sheets suspended two meters above the ground. Javacheff Christo last work, in order of time, is the walkway on Lake Iseo, The floating piers, covered with tarpaulins that connects Sulzano, on the mainland, to Montisola and then on to the island of Sao Paulo and back. The walkway consists of floating crates, anchored to each other and with the bottom, of the total width of fourteen meters and a length of 4.5 km. The work was inaugurated on June 18, 2016 and closed the following July 3, then for the usual duration of two weeks. Christo died in New York on May 31, 2020 from natural causes while he was working on the packing of the Arc de Triomphe in Paris

Tags: Christo Javacheff - Christo and Jeanne Claude - Nouveau Réalisme - running fence - the gates - the umbrellas - over the river - the floating piers - the pont neuf wrapped - wrapped roman wall 

Javacheff christo - Nouveau Réalisme

The Nouveau Réalisme is an artistic movement founded in Paris on October 27, 1960 by Pierre Restany who brought together under this name a group of artists including Villeglé, Arman, Heins, Klein, Spoerri, Tinguely to which later Christo, Rotella and Niki de Saint-Phalle were added. The group broke into three strands. The members of what he intended to recover in artistic form the language of advertising communication were, Rotella, Villeglè, Dufréne and Deschamps. These were also called Affichisti because the most full-bodied work of these was to remove the billboards that were in the cities and paste them on canvas. Usually these artists glued on the same canvas several layers of billboards that then worked performing tears that were not random but depended on the aesthetic taste of the artist and the message that he wanted to give. Among them was particular Mimmo Rotella, who had the idea of presenting not only the visible part of the torn posters, but also the back part that adhered to the support, land or wall. This is how what he called the Retro d'Affiche were born.