"With Jeanne-Claude, Christo realized some of the most celebrated public installations of the past half-century, often using ordinary materials to defamiliarize treasures of human ingenuity in order to renew their meaning within the landscape. Among the structures wrapped by the couple were islands in Biscayne Bay in Miami, the Reichstag in Berlin, and of course, the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris. While the wrapping was the most visible aspect of their practice, the act itself exposed the invisible, tangled bureaucracies and ambitions behind the creation of vast monuments-and the real-world consequences of those efforts."
"The tribute, titled Pont Neuf Cavern, was "100% the most challenging thing I've ever done.""
""I love a challenge," JR added. "I realized this was an opportunity for me to do something that I needed to do and hadn't been able to do before. Suddenly, I realized I could actually wrap this bridge and create a real cave in it.""
JR will wrap the Pont Neuf bridge in Paris next June, covering the 761-foot span in fabric under the title Pont Neuf Cavern. The project honors Christo and Jeanne-Claude and recalls their large-scale wrapping interventions, including the Arc de Triomphe project completed after Christo's death in 2024. Vladimir Yavachev, director of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation, approached JR to mark the 30-year anniversary of the bridge's initial staging. JR frames the work as an extreme challenge and an opportunity to create a cave-like effect within the bridge. Christo and Jeanne-Claude used ordinary materials to transform and reframe public monuments.
Read at ARTnews.com
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