Christo comes to London

2018-04-11T15:57:00-04:00

And now he’s going to float a 150-tonne sculpture on a lake on London. Is it an allegory of the west’s oil dependency, an indictment of how we’re polluting the planet, or both? Christo shakes his locks and smiles. “I have no reason to justify myself as an artist. I cannot explain my art. Everything I do professionally is irrational and useless.” This, he thinks, is exactly as it should be. “I make things that have no function – except maybe to make pleasure.”

Artist Christo chats about his new Mastaba sculpture coming to London this summer: a giant trapezoidal prism of 7,506 stacked steel barrels to float on the Serpentine Lake. It will be his first large artwork in Britain.

Christo, The Mastaba (Project for London, Hyde Park, Serpentine Lake), Collage 2017 Pencil, wax crayon, enamel paint, color photograph by Wolfgang Volz, technical data and tape on brown board, 21.5 x 28 cm, Private collection, Switzerland. Photo: André Grossmann © 2017 Christo

Plans for a much bigger Mastaba with 410,000 barrels outside of Abu Dhabi first appeared several years ago but were never realized.

The accompanying exhibition Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Barrels and The Mastaba (1958–2018) will be on view from June 19 through September 9 at the nearby Serpentine Gallery.

Archinect - News

Christo comes to London