When he wasn't wrapping buildings and bridges with giant pieces of fabric, Christo was trying to wrap nothing.
The Bulgarian artist, known with his partner Jeanne-Claude for the wrapped Reichstag, the covered Arc de Triomphe, and the fabric-covered Pont Neuf, found a way to encompass, protect, and simultaneously drown out the world around him. But in the 1960s, he had an even more unusual goal: to wrap the air.
Christo wanted to contain the air inside a room, but the initial idea was limited by the technical possibilities of the time. Now, 50 years after the project was first proposed for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia and six years after the artist's death in 2020, the idea has finally been realized.
In the entrance hall of the Gagosian Gallery, the space is divided horizontally by a large polyethylene bag, suspended from the ceiling by white ropes. It sits heavily in the middle of the room, forcing the visitor to bend over to pass under it. In this way, the audience not only sees the work, but enters into a physical relationship with it; they are forced to change the way they move and experience the space.
Essentially, the room remains empty. There is nothing inside but air. But now that air has become visible. It has taken on form and physical presence.
The wonder of this work lies not only in the fact that it turns air into something tangible, but also in the feeling of weight it gives it. The plastic bag hangs, expands and swells under the pressure of the ropes. It falls into space and seems to weigh down the room. It resembles flesh that cannot be held by clothes, with a body that explodes over a very narrow belt. It is surprising: the air becomes visible, physical and heavy.
This was not the only time Christo worked with air. During the 1960s, he created works with wrapped bubbles, attempting to contain the uncontainable. The photographs on display show a project for Documenta in 1968: a giant polyethylene tube that the team could barely lift. At first, it swayed helplessly until the US Air Force intervened and lifted it completely.
The image is both funny and clear in its bodily subtext: a giant form of air and plastic rising skyward in a German park. This makes the physical dimension of the main work even more apparent. It is not just air made visible; it is air turned into a body, bound with rope.
In the last room, an old Volvo, which belonged to one of Christos’ art dealers, is wrapped in a sheet. The owner had bought a new car but was too emotionally attached to the old one to scrap it. Christos’s intervention thus becomes an act of preservation. He has preserved the car’s past life, the memories embedded in the leather, metal and rubber. The car stands there as a monument to its history.
Christos’ art is a strange mix of the profound and the absurd. The car is, after all, just a Volvo covered in a sheet. The main installation may look like a room where workers have left the materials unsorted after some repair. But then the works begin to open up thoughts about space, weight, the body, proximity, history, and memory.
You think about your body in that room, about the air you're breathing, about the hours someone has spent in that car traveling to their family or the beach. And suddenly, from something so simple, you feel an unexpected emotion.
To achieve this effect, Christos needed only a few ropes, a sheet, and an extremely large plastic bag. /GazetaExpress/
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