Great works

At the same time or soon after their first works designed and sometimes made in Europe, Christo and Jeanne-Claude began working in Australia and the United States, as they had moved to New York in September 1964.

Wrapped Cost was made in Little Bay Sydney, Australia between 1968 and 1969, Valley Curtain in Rifle, Colorado between 1970 and 1972, Ocean Front in Newport, Rhode Island just south of Boston in 1974, and lastly Running Fence was made in Sonoma and Marin Counties in California between 1972 and 1976.

They are all very large works, where huge sheets of polypropylene or white nylon (orange in the case of Valley Curtain) covered and hid vast spaces of coast, water, sky for a few weeks. Conceptual environmental works which lasted only a short period but works that can always be revisited thanks to preparatory studies: drawings, collages, scale models and videos.

In the case of Valley Curtain, the large orange sheet that stretched like an immense dam between the ends of two hills lasted only 28 hours, from 10 August 1972 to the following day, since strong gusts of wind, even up to 100 kilometres per hour, called for its rapid removal.

Running Fence, on the other hand, like a light and very long wall of white nylon fabric, was 5.5 metres high and almost forty kilometres long, unfolding from east to west just north of San Francisco on the private properties of 59 livestock farmers, finally reaching its end in an ideal dive into the Pacific Ocean of Bodega Bay.