Christo’s unrealised ‘Air’ installation finally opens at Gagosian gallery London
Best known for wrapping landmarks and altering entire landscapes, Christo takes a quieter approach here — a 1960s work, finally realised at Gagosian, that turns something as intangible as air into a walk-through installation.
More than fifty years after it was conceived, a work by Christo is being built for the first time. Christo: Air, opening at Gagosian this May, centres on Air Package on a Ceiling, a project he and Jeanne-Claude developed in 1968 but never realised due to technical constraints.
Installed across the gallery, the piece stretches 16 metres, internally lit and suspended just above head height. It occupies the space rather than sitting within it, drawing visitors underneath and around it, closer to an environment than a discrete object.
Christo, who fled Bulgaria in the late 1950s and later worked between Paris and New York, built his reputation on temporary interventions that altered how familiar places were seen — from wrapped buildings to large-scale landscape works. Those later projects are well known, but this exhibition looks further back, to the early experiments that shaped them.
In the 1960s, Christo and Jeanne-Claude began enclosing air in plastic and binding it with rope, treating it as a material in its own right. Several of those works are included here, alongside drawings and models for the unrealised installation, tracing how the idea developed over time.
A second gallery features Wrapped Automobile (Volvo, Model PV-544), shown publicly for the first time in decades. Like the earlier pieces, it takes a familiar object and renders it partially inaccessible, shifting attention from what it is to how it is experienced.
CHRISTO
Air
May 21, 6–8pm May 21–August 21, 2026
20 Grosvenor Hill, London
Featured images:
Christo and Jeanne-Claude, Air Package on a Ceiling (Project for the Institute of Contemporary Art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia), 1968 © Christo and Jeanne-Claude FoundationPhoto: Charles Roussel. Courtesy Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation and Gagosian
Christo, 5,600 Cubicmeter Package (first skin). Installation view: Kassel, 1968. Artwork © Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation. Photo: Klaus Baum. Courtesy Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation and Gagosian
Elena Leo is the Culture & Lifestyle Editor of Ikon London Magazine.
