Christo, together with his wife and artistic partner Jeanne-Claude, are renowned for their artwork that transcends traditional painting, sculpture and architecture. Born in Bulgaria in 1935, Christo was encouraged to pursue art by his mother, a former secretary to the director of the Sofia National Academy of Art, where he later studied drawing, painting, sculpture, and architecture. He left Bulgaria for Prague in 1956, briefly exploring the city and creating a series of drawings featuring notable landmarks. When the Hungarian Revolution began in 1957, Christo fled to Vienna and later found refuge in Geneva. To earn money, Christo painted classical portraits of society ladies. Christo first encountered European modernism and avant-garde styles as he toured art museums in Switzerland.



Christo moved to Paris in 1958 where he became enmeshed in the progressive art scene, creating a series of abstract compositions, and highly textured paintings and reliefs. In Paris, Christo met European and American avant-garde artists such as Karlheinz Stockhausen, John Cage, Joseph Beuys, and Nam June Paik. Inspired by the unconventional styles of these figures, Christo began to explore the appropriation of everyday objects with his first wrapped works. Using ordinary materials and found objects, Christo transformed everyday things into unrecognizable sculptures. Christo first started with small wrapped paint cans and bottles, large oil barrels, and later to more common, everyday objects such as furniture, magazines, bicycles, telephones, toys, shoes, and a stroller. While many of the early wrapped works were covered in canvas, Christo also experimented with transparent polyethylene to allow viewers to see the wrapped object.



Christo’s Wrapped Toy Horse was created in 1963 using his son Cyril’s toy, and wrapping it with fabric, rope, and twine (fig. 1). While the dense fabric conceals the contents of the package, the form is instantly recognizable due to the tight wrapping. The small scale and the colorful frame and wheels suggest its original function as a childhood toy. Despite the personal and sentimental nature of his child’s toy, Christo was primarily interested in the objects as a physical thing. He emphasized the sculpture’s form and texture through the thickly wrapped and folded fabrics, and the tightly cinched rope and twine holding the artwork in place. Through wrapping, Christo rendered the object’s provenance, function, and meaning obsolete.



Wrapped Toy Horse was formerly in the collection of Sheila and Jan van der Marck, a notable curator, and the first director of the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago. Van der Marck helped shape the landscape of postwar exhibition practice in Europe and the United States when many museums were cautious about experimental, conceptually driven artwork. Van der Marck was an early supporter of Christo and Jeanne-Claude, and in 1968 he invited the artists to wrap the Museum of

Contemporary Art Chicago in canvas. It was the artists’ first wrapped building in the United States,

which helped to establish their reputation in this country. Van der Marck continued to support

the artists when he worked as a project manager for Valley Curtain, a work of art consisting of a

length of orange nylon fabric suspended between two cliffs near Rifle, Colorado in 1972. In 1983, as

director of the Center for the Fine Arts in Miami (now the Miami Art Museum), Van der Marck

invited Christo and Jeanne-Claude to do a project that would become Surrounded Islands, where

eleven islands in Biscayne Bay were wrapped with pink propylene fabric.



While Christo's early wrapped objects were executed with spontaneity, they paved the way for his

larger, more planned conceptions that began in the early 1960s in collaboration with Jeanne-

Claude. No longer satisfied with small-scale work, Christo and Jeanne-Claude made sketches and

drawings for complex wrapped objects, buildings, and monuments that were later realized in cities

across the world.