Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Water Projects

Curated by Germano Celant

The Santa Giulia Museum in Brescia presents the exhibition Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Water Projects opening on April 7, 2016, curated by Germano Celant in collaboration with the artist and his studio. The show will offer an unprecedented display of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s water-related projects, that is those based on rural and urban landscapes characterized by the presence of water in the form of an ocean, a sea, a lake, or a river.

With over 150 exhibits comprising the artists’ original preparatory studies, drawings and collages, complemented by scale-models, photos of the finished projects, videos, and films, inside the museum’s 2,000 square meter exhibition space, Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Water Projects presents a chronological display of the artists’ monumental works since the early '60s and illustrates their seven Water Projects: from Wrapped Coast, One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Sydney, Australia, 1968–69 to The Floating Piers, Project for Lake Iseo, Italy, 2014–16. The exhibition aims at presenting the projects within a historical framework, contextualizing their evolution, from 1961 to the present day, illustrating the artists’ water-related works in their different stages of realization, from the first concept sketches, to the drawings, collages and models that follow, all the way to the actual realization of the work documented in the form of photos and videos. The exhibition will also include an informative and interactive section opening in June, documenting the Lake Iseo environmental art project in the making; in this section viewers will have the chance to see video projections and a display of materials (also virtual) by the artist, all related to the project’s realization process, alongside a live streaming of photos and videos posted by the viewers visiting the installation on the Lake.

This exhibition will be open at the same time as The Floating Piers, the installation that will be set up and open to viewers on Lake Iseo from June 18 to July 3, 2016, marking Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s return to Italy after 40 years.

The monumental work will lead visitors along a more than three-kilometre route across the Lake’s waters and along its shores. The work will consist of 70,000 square meters of shimmering orange fabric covering a sequence of 16-meter-wide modular floating piers made with 200,000 cubes of high-density polyethylene. The itinerary will stretch across land and water, from Sulzano to Monte Isola, also comprising the island of San Paolo.

The exhibition catalogue, edited by Germano Celant, will be published in two versions—Italian and English—by Silvana Editoriale, Milan. The publication will include a chronological listing of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s large-scale projects (even those that were never realized) from 1961 to 2016, with particular focus on the single Water Projects. Every project—either accomplished, ongoing, or never realized—will be introduced by an explanatory text accompanied by images of the preliminary sketches, and photo-documentation of the preparatory works and final set up.