Five years after the death of the sculptor Christo, his monumental vision is still re-making iconic landmarks. The French photographer and street artist JR has announced plans to “wrap” the Pont Neuf, a historic standing bridge spanning the Seine in Paris, in a tribute to Christo and his longtime collaborator and wife, Jeanne-Claude.
Next June the 761-feet-long bridge will be swathed in fabric, recalling the couple’s signature interventions. These include the ambitious transformation of Paris’s Arc de Triomphe in 269,097 square feet of material, a project completed posthumously after Christo’s death in 2024. Speaking to the Guardian from his studio in Paris, JR said the tribute, titled Pont Neuf Cavern, was “100% the most challenging thing I’ve ever done.”
Christo’s nephew Vladimir Yavachev, director of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, reportedly approached the artist with the project to mark the 30-year anniversary of its initial staging.
“I love a challenge,” JR added. “I realized this was an opportunity for me to do something that I needed to do and hadn’t been able to do before. Suddenly, I realized I could actually wrap this bridge and create a real cave in it.”
The Pont Neuf wrapped by Christo and Jeanne Claude in 1985.
Andre Crudo/Photo12/Universal Im
With Jeanne-Claude, Christo realized some of the most celebrated public installations of the past half-century, often using ordinary materials to defamiliarize treasures of human ingenuity in order to renew their meaning within the landscape. Among the structures wrapped by the couple were islands in Biscayne Bay in Miami, the Reichstag in Berlin, and of course, the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris. While the wrapping was the most visible aspect of their practice, the act itself exposed the invisible, tangled bureaucracies and ambitions behind the creation of vast monuments—and the real-world consequences of those efforts.
That’s familiar ground for JR, who for more than two decades has created large-scale public artworks addressing intersecting issues of migration, urbanization, climate, and conflict. Last year he installed an optical illusion on Milan’s Stazione Centrale railway station that resembled a vast fissure ripping open its facade.
More recently, the French dealer Emmanuel Perrotin inaugurated his new gallery in London with works from two of JR’s series: “Deplacé-e-s” (2022-ongoing) and “Enfants d’Ouranos” (Children of Ouranos), the latter of which debuted at Perrotin’s New York space in 2023. Both projects highlighted the plight of refugees—particularly children—fleeing social turmoil in Ukraine, to Rwanda and Colombia.
The artist was two years old when the Pont Neuf bridge was first wrapped in 1985. “Much later, when I discovered the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, I realized what I had missed,” he told the Guardian.”
He continued: “To be asked to do something 40 years later on the same bridge is a huge responsibility but also an incredible moment for me to create something truly mesmerising, to push myself into creating a piece that will also, I hope, make a mark on the city of Paris – and maybe the world – like Christo and Jeanne-Claude did.”
