Christo: Air

Gagosian is pleased to announce an exhibition of works by Christo, and a large-scale indoor installation conceived by Christo and Jeanne-Claude in 1968. Organized around the theme of air—invisible, intangible, and essential—the exhibition unites the historic, unrealized project with rare early works that distill the conceptual foundations of the artist’s practice. In the 1960s, Christo and Jeanne-Claude developed a series of works exploring wrapped air, sealing it within transparent polyethylene packages bound with rope. These intimate sculptural gestures render their invisible subject tangible, thereby proposing a radical shift in perception which suggests that value and meaning might emerge not from an object itself, but from the act of its containment. Such works foreshadow the artist’s later interventions at environmental scale, in which buildings, landscapes, and public spaces are temporarily redefined through acts of wrapping that reveal latent sculptural qualities while obscuring function and identity. As throughout Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s practice, the works on view foreground the ephemeral, echoing philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of perception as a lived, shifting experience grounded in the immediacy of encounter. The exhibition is centered on Air Package on a Ceiling, a vast, internally illuminated and suspended form. Originally conceived in 1968 for the Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia, the installation remained unrealized due to technical constraints. Installed here for the first time in collaboration with the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, it occupies the full volume of the space—16 meters long, 10 meters wide, and descending to just above head height. Both architectural and atmospheric, it compels visitors to move beneath and around it.