Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude who died in 2009 will always be remembered as the masters of the so called Land Art, an artistic form characterized by the direct intervention of the artist on the natural territory. Other examples of this art form are the spirals by Robert Smithson or the Grande Cretto by Alberto Burri.
Christo: a biography
Christo Yavachev was born in 1935 in Bulgaria, the son of an entrepreneur and of a secretary at the Academy of Fine Arts of Sofia. When he ended his studies (1956) in the school were his mother worked he moved to Praga but then decided to move to Vienna at first and then Geneva due to the communism regime.
In 1958 he arrived in Paris where he met for the first time his wife to be Jeanne-Claude who will be later become part of the artistic duo knows as Christo. They both emigrated to the United States in 1964 were they started to get acknowledgement for their artworks.
The Floating Piers
Christo has significanlty contributed to the art world thanks to the massive works which could not go unnoticed. Everyone has seen or heard at least once about monuments completely wrapped by gigantic and colorful sheets of fabric.
One of these monuments is the equestrian statue of King Vittorio Emanuele in Piazza Duomo in Milan. In 1970 it was completely covered in a white sheet kept togeher with a rope. That year the same happened to the statue of Leonardo Da Vinci in Piazza della Scala right in front of the opera house of Milan.
More recently another project took over an entire lake in Norther Italy. From the 18th of June to the 3rd of July 2016 a network of floating piers on lake Iseo open to pedestrian transit. Thanks to these piers it was possible to actually walk on the water to get to the small island of San Paolo right in the centre of the lake.
In the two weeks of its existance the Foating Piers attracted more than 1.5 million visitors who walked the rafts covered in orange and eventually visited the surroundings of the marvellous Lake Iseo. The art work was so popular that the technical committee had to shut it down during the nights for security and maintenance reasons.
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