Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Hidden 1968 Installation Will Debut at Gagosian in London
A long-unrealized project by Christo and Jeanne-Claude is finally moving from archive to exhibition space. Gagosian will present Air Package on a Ceiling at its Mayfair gallery in London, where the installation will be shown from May 21 through August 21.
The work was first conceived in 1968 for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia, but technical constraints prevented it from being built at the time. Based on the original model, preparatory drawings, and collages, the installation measures 52 feet long and 33 feet wide. Its inflated form, wrapped in rope and softly illuminated from within, resembles half a cloud pressing through the ceiling.
The original plans resurfaced in 2018, when Lorenza Giovanelli, Christo’s studio manager, was clearing space in the artist’s atelier and found a box containing the scale model. The model included electric wiring to demonstrate the lighting component, and Giovanelli later described it as being in exceptional condition because it had never been exposed to sunlight.
The presentation offers a rare look at a strand of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s practice that preceded their best-known wrapped monuments, including Pont Neuf in Paris and the Reichstag in Berlin. In the 1960s, the pair developed a series of works that treated air itself as a material, enclosing it in transparent polyethylene packages and rope. Those experiments shifted attention away from the object and toward the act of wrapping, a conceptual move that would become central to their later projects.
Alongside Air Package on a Ceiling, Gagosian will show a selection of earlier works from that period, as well as Wrapped Automobile–Volvo, Model PV-544 (1981). In that piece, Christo covered an old car belonging to art dealer Serge De Bloe as a way of preserving it from destruction.
The London presentation underscores how much of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s legacy still lives in plans, models, and unrealized proposals. Even decades later, the pair’s work continues to feel less like a closed chapter than an unfinished conversation about scale, labor, and the poetry of transformation.
