Fifty years after the conception of the Wrapped Monument to Cristobal Colón, Barcelona ’s Prats Nogueras Blanchard Gallery is presenting an exhibition that brings attention back to a lesser-known but crucial side of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s work: the unbuilt projects. Entitled The Architecture of the Unbuilt, the exhibition will be on view at the Catalan venue from September 18 to November 14, 2025, and is part of the Barcelona Gallery Weekend program.
The starting point of the exhibition is precisely Project for Barcelona, one of several works conceived by the pair but never completed. The idea of wrapping the Christopher Columbus monument was elaborated in 1975, but was initially rejected by local authorities. After two rejections, Mayor Pasqual Maragall finally granted permission in 1984, but it was the duo themselves who decided not to proceed. Nevertheless, the project left a lasting impression: in 1977 the historic Galeria Joan Prats was wrapped in fabric, becoming the only work created in Spain by Christo and Jeanne-Claude. At the same time, preparatory drawings and collages for the Colón monument were exhibited at Galeria Trece.
“To speak of Christo’s drawings is to enter a space of becoming,” argues Lorenza Giovanelli, who signs the critical text accompanying the exhibition. “It is there that the impossible takes shape, where bureaucracy is irrelevant and the scope of imagination has no limits. For projects that were never realized - by fate or choice - these works remain testimonies, evidence of worlds imagined with extraordinary clarity and dedication.”
The Architecture of the Unbuilt thus stems from a specific historical context and focuses on the idea that art, in order to exist, need not materialize in a physical space. In fact, the duo’s never-realized works were never intended as abandoned dreams, but rather as completed works through sketches, engineering studies, collages, models and detailed documentation. The entire process, from first intuition to bureaucracy, from site surveys to confrontations with local communities, was for them an integral part of the work. According to Christo and Jeanne-Claude, creative freedom was the indispensable raw material of their work. They systematically refused commissions and sponsorships, financing each intervention through the sale of drawings, lithographs, scale models, and sculptures, often marketed through the mediation of galleries such as Leo Castelli’s in New York. This self-supporting model guaranteed them the independence they needed to operate outside the constraints of the market and institutions.
Both born in 1935, within an hour of each other, Christo in Gabrovo, Bulgaria, and Jeanne-Claude in Casablanca, met in Paris in 1958. Christo had just fled communist Bulgaria via Prague and Vienna, while Jeanne-Claude had studied philosophy and Latin between Tunis, France and Switzerland. They began collaborating under the name Christo until 1994, when they decided to sign each project jointly.
Their work has always moved on a monumental and temporary scale, aiming to transform the experience of public space. Their completed projects include Wrapped Coast in Little Bay, Australia (1969), Valley Curtain in Colorado (1972), Running Fence in California (1976), Surrounded Islands in Florida (1983), The Pont Neuf Wrapped in Paris (1985), Wrapped Reichstag in Berlin (1995), and The Gates in Central Park, New York (2005).
Theirs was a radical approach to environmental sculpture that challenged the very idea of permanence in art. An unrealized project, for them, was not a failure. It was an autonomous form, capable of existing through layered drawings of photographs, textiles, pastels, and industrial paint.
After Jeanne-Claude’s death in 2009, Christo continued to pursue the projects they started together. These included The Floating Piers, realized in 2016 on Lake Iseo in Italy, and The Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped, opened posthumously in 2021 in Paris, which during its 16-day exhibition was seen by 6 million people live and some 685 million through media and social networks. Christo passed away in 2020, but their work lives on. The team that has always collaborated with the pair is working on their last major project: The Mastaba, a sculpture composed of 410,000 barrels, destined to become the duo’s only large-scale permanent work.
The Barcelona exhibition thus offers a journey through ideas that, while never translated into physical works, retain their conceptual power intact.
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| Christo and Jeanne-Claude's never-realized projects on display in Barcelona |
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