Gagosian

Given his status as perhaps the artist most affiliated with these two descriptors in the history of postwar art, Christo’s ambitious proposals to wrap, drape, or stack at an architectural scale around the world wholly align with the platform’s aim to show artworks that are not only large but that transcend the typical boundaries of art making. Wrapped 1961 Volkswagen Beetle Saloon offers a rare opportunity to see up close—and permanently—one of Christo’s large-scale, three-dimensional wrapping projects, a work that is situated between his smaller wrapped objects from the beginning of his mature career and his massive projects that temporarily wrapped buildings and bridges.

By 2014, Christo could be counted among the world’s most recognized artists. Monumental projects that he and his collaborator and wife, Jeanne-Claude, had carried out across the globe since the early 1960s had garnered the pair much recognition and, as time went on, acclaim. In 2013, Christo realized Big Air Package (2010–13) at the Gasometer Oberhausen in Germany. Then billed as the largest indoor sculpture to ever be created, this work was a 90-meter-high, 50-meter-wide package of air that allowed visitors to enter its 177,000 cubic meter volume—certainly an unforgettable experience for those lucky enough to experience it firsthand.

Sadly, Jeanne-Claude passed away in 2009, and so memories of these astonishing successes must have been bittersweet for Christo. It seems the artist found himself intent on reliving some of his early memories of working with Jeanne-Claude. Rather than focusing on one of their internationally renowned projects, Christo found himself lingering on the temporary object Wrapped Car (Volkswagen) (1963).

Wrapping was Christo’s signature technique; it was an integral aspect of the artist’s revolutionary practice throughout his seventy-year career. From his first wrapped paint cans to the posthumously realized L'Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped, Paris (1961–2021), Christo covered objects to intensify their mystique, as well as to invoke new ways to understand an object’s three-dimensionality and form. Indeed, for over seventy years, Christo embraced the act of “revelation through concealment,” as critic David Bourdon asserted in his 1970 biography on the artist. And though Christo had moved from wrapping single objects to entire buildings, in 2014 the artist decided to revisit Wrapped Car (Volkswagen) from fifty years ago, when he was in the first years of his career and Jeanne-Claude was still by his side.