Gagosian gallery in London will present an artwork conceived by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 1968 but never realized before the artists’ deaths—Jeanne-Claude in 2009 and Christo in 2020.
The exhibition “Christo: Air,” opening May 21 and running through August 21, will feature rare works by Christo as well as Air Package on a Ceiling, a work that Christo and Jeanne-Claude planned for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia but never mounted due to technical limitations. Described in the gallery’s press release for the exhibition as a “vast, internally illuminated and suspended form,” the work will measure around 32 by 52 feet and hangs just over the heads of viewers in the gallery.
In a story about the show in the Guardian, Lorenza Giovanelli, who started working as Christo’s studio manager in 2017, said, “It will look like a beautiful cloud, lit from within, hanging from the ceiling of the gallery space … It will be very magical … I’ve imagined this many times. So I am really impatient to see it.” She added: “I believe people will really find it extremely beautiful.”
It was Giovanelli who found the original plans for Air Package on a Ceiling in 2018, just two years before Christo’s death at the age of 84. A detail scale model showed the work “mocked up in a gallery maquette complete with electrical wiring to convey the work’s lighting elements.”
Other works in the Gagosian show will include Wrapped Automobile—Volvo, Model PV-544 (1981), a car wrapped in the manner that made Christo famous that has not been shown in 30 years.
