Christo 3 Store Fronts (Project for Room No. 1, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Holland), Collage 1965-66 P e n c i l , f a b r i c , e n a m e l p a i n t , b r o w n w r a p p i n g p a p e r, p l e x i g l a s , c a r d b o a r d , c h a r c o a l , w a x c r a y o n , t a p e , a n d e l e c t r i c l i g h t , on wood, 122 x 96.5 x 5 cm Property of the artist Photo: Eeva-Inkeri P. 1 0 - 1 1 — B R A F A
GUEST OF HONOUR : CHRISTO
Brafa 2018 has the great honour of welcoming one of the most renowned and influential contemporary artists in the person of Christo. An emblematic figure along with his late wife Jeanne-Claude, the inseparable duo has come to be known in particular for their wrapping of historic monuments and large-scale landscape installations. It is one of his historic works from the 1960s that will be presented at Brafa.
Three Store Fronts (1965-66) The work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude has much in common with architecture and urban planning, and the immense impact it has on our perception of buildings and urban space is one of the most original intentions of the artists. Christo and Jeanne-Claude may not create architecture, but all their works raise architectural questions. Vastness and confinement, as well as the place of people in the public and private space, have always been central concerns of their work. The artists did come close to literally making architecture during one period in the mid-1960s, however, when Christo became entranced with the notion of Store Fronts, and produced a number of works resembling full-size shop fronts with conventional architectural details. Three Store Fronts (1965-66), on display at this year’s edition of Brafa, belongs to this iconic series of works that emerged between 1964 and 1968 and set off the artists’ remarkable career. Made out of materials found in scrap heaps and the abandoned buildings in New York City and in France, the first Store Fronts exuded an elegant archaic appearance. They had paneled fronts, large, projecting display windows and inset doors, and they were painted in colors—deep green, burgundy red, yellow, orange, and pink—that purposefully brought to mind the façade of an old shop, thus recalling the nostalgic and desolate feeling of Edward Hopper’s paintings. They teased at sentimentality, but there is too much rigor to these structures, and too much seriousness to the ideas behind them, for them to fall over the edge into sentimentality. Nostalgia is not the purpose of the Store Fronts—even if one inevitably feels a whiff of it when looking at them. They rather explore space, and enclosure, and mystery, and the dividing line between public and private, as determinedly as any of the artists’ other works. However, by partially covering the inside of the glass windows with a white fabric cloth, Christo turned the function of the store fronts around. The draped windows stir up curiosity in visitors, who peer closely at the inaccessible space beyond the curtain. Christo further perverted this situation by illuminating the inside of the Store Fronts with a light bulb.
Christo 3 Store Fronts (Project for Room No. 1, Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, Holland), Collage 1965-66 Pencil, fabric, aluminum paint, acrylic paint, wax crayon, charcoal, cardboard, and Plexiglas, on wood, 61 x 97 x 3 cm The Lilja Art Fund Foundation, Basel, Switzerland Photo: Eeva-Inkeri
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Although these works reveal little kinship with Christo’s famous Packages and street barricade that he had realized when still living in Paris, his development has been surprisingly consistent. The Store Fronts were an attempt to expand the mystery of the Packages and the small, wrapped pieces to architectural scale. On closer examination we find the same parameters in the earlier and later works: exclusion, distance, separation, optical negation, and blockade. Christo’s Store Fronts have elements that have been carried throughout the artists’ career. The curtains of fabric draped on the inside of the windows can be seen as forerunners of such projects as the Valley Curtain, the Running Fence or The Gates. In most of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work, physical space is very real, and powerfully three-dimensional. You feel the space on either side of the Valley Curtain, in other words, just as you feel the space around the Running Fence or underneath and around The Gates in Central Park. An unusual, even unique, physical structure forces you to contemplate the reality of space in a new and different way. However, in the case of the Store Fronts, everything is reversed. It is the structure that is conventional, quite deliberately common and familiar in appearance, and it is the space itself that is surprising, since it is not truly there; it is but an illusion. Christo further explored the idea of obstruction in architecture in a second series of Store Fronts executed on monumental scales, such as the Three Store Fronts of 1965-66. Beginning in 1965, Christo had decisively changed the design and size of the series. He put aside the old-fashioned shop front design in favor of an all-glass and metal Store Front. The charm of the handcrafted gave way to an industrial formality, the colors to a clinically polished surface, vaguely reminiscent of modernization schemes from the 1940s and 1950s, and recalling the gigantic dimensions of New York architecture. While rather smaller objects were prevalent in the early 1960s, from the mid-1960s Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s interest turned into altering whole rooms and environments, which actively engaged the spectators. While the early Store Fronts functioned as independent sculptures, Three Store Fronts was not simply designed to be looked at. Originally built for Christo’s first personal museum exhibition, at the Van Abbemuseum in Eindhoven, the Netherlands, in 1966, the work completely filled the large exhibition room of the gallery. The visitors could hardly view the entire sculpture at once. Entering the room on one side, they literally had to pace off the fourteen meter long work, leaving the room at the other end of the gallery. In fact, Three Store Fronts is brilliantly subtle in the way that it masks strong questions about public and private space, and visibility and wrapping, within the guise of a seemingly familiar façade. The normally public space in front of a shop is relocated inside a gallery, while the normally private space is visually and physically hidden by the draped windows and locked doors. Three Store Fronts is a significant early work of the artist: its outer framed structure is not hidden but functions as an independent massive sculpture that conceals the inner space, thus providing an ingenious approach to the work, requiring perceptive participation, rather than a merely physical understanding.
C h r i s t o i n h i s s t u d i o w i t h T h r e e S t o r e F r o n t s , N e w Yo r k C i t y, 1 9 6 6 Photo: Ferdinand Boesch
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Christo Three Store Fronts, 1965-66 Galvanized metal, aluminum, wood, fabric, Masonite, paint, Plexiglas, and electric light, 2.44 m x 14.2 m x 43 cm Property of the artist
Installation view at Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven, The Netherlands, 1966 Photo: Archive Christo
Installation view at Martin-Gropius-Bau, Berlin, 2001 Photo: Wolfgang Volz