Christo, Artist Who Wrapped Landmarks Around The World In Fabric, Dies At 84

Christo, a Bulgaria-born artist, best known for wrapping landmarks around the world, died on Sunday in his home in New York City, according to posts on his official Twitter and Facebook pages. He was 84.

Although no specific cause of death was cited, the post said he died of “natural causes.”

Christo, whose full name was Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, created large-scale public works of art with his late wife, Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon.

The pair famously wrapped France’s Pont Neuf in Paris in 1985, and the Reichstag building in Berlin in 1995. They hung fabric from mountains in Colarado over a quarter-mile in 1972, and later on surrounded several islands in Biscayne Bay in Florida with fabric, making them look like they were sitting on pink plates. In New York City’s Central Park in 2005, the couple designed thousands of gates with yellow curtains to span the park’s 23-miles of walkway.

More recently, after his wife’s death, Christo had created a floating walk way in Lombardy, Italy’s Lake Iseo, connecting the mainland to two islands in 2016. In 2018, he designed a giant floating sculpture of oil barrels in a lake in London’s Hyde Park, which was only supposed to be a small-scale version of a planned permanent installment in Abu Dhabi made of 300,000 oil barrels, though Christo did not live long enough to see that sculpture come to fruition.

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According to the posts on his official pages, his upcoming installment at the time of his death — wrapping the Arc de Triomphe in Paris — will still go ahead in the fall of 2021.

Christo was born in Gabrovo, Bulgaria in 1935, and he moved around as a young man, to Prague, Czechoslovakia, Austria, and Switzerland. He then moved to Paris, where he met his wife, and the two moved to New York City with their son. Christo lived in New York City for a total of 56 years.

Cristo is survived by his son Cyril Christo, a wildlife photographer.