Empaquetage

When Bulgarian-born Christo moved to Paris in 1958, he began a new series of works called Empaquetages. Ordinary everyday objects such as bottles, canisters, and items of furniture are wrapped in packing material. At this time, Pop artists in the USA were exploring the world of advertising and commodities. While Andy Warhol overtly presented cans of food in bright colors, Christo removed everyday objects from our gaze. His wrapped art is a contrast to conventional commercial packaging, which wishes to seduce us to buy by using conspicuous colors, a pleasant form, and easy-to-understood product information. Christo’s Empaquetages are not design but improvisation; they are not informative but secretive; they are not produced en masse, but made by hand. Since 1961, Christo and his partner Jeanne-Claude have focused in their work on large temporary projects in public spaces. In 1983, for example, they surrounded eleven islands in Florida with pink fabric for two weeks. Two years later they wrapped Paris’s Pont Neuf, also for two weeks. The scale of their Empaquetage then reached a sensational high point in 1985, when they wrapped the Berlin Reichstag building.