Bulgarian born artist, settled in Paris in 1958. In contact with the New Realists, he began to wrap found objects in cloth, placing the emphasis less on the contained than on the container. These wrapped forms could range from more recognizable shapes like a chair, a woman, to unidentified objects. From 1968 he worked with his wife Jeanne-Claude (b.1935). In 1968 he actually wrapped his first building, the Kunstahalle in Bern, Switzerland.. The Christos are best known for their vast environmental projects that have involved wrappings not only whole buildings but even significant portions of open nature, as was the case of Running Fence, a 1972-76 work executed in the California coastal counties. In 1995 the Christos realized a project that had been in preparation since 1971. They wrapped the Reichstag in Berlin, the traditional seat of the German parliament and a building with a long and violent history.
