On December 8th, 2021, PIASA is honored to offer for sale a work by the artist Christo. Produced in the late 1950s, Wrapped Cans is a formidable early work by Christo Vladimiroff Javacheff (1935-2020). It consists of four metal boxes. Two of them are "wrapped" with fabric and string.
This practice prefigures in a certain way the projects of This practice prefigures, in a way, the covering projects implemented with his wife Jeanne-Claude, and sometimes deployed on a very large scale as shown by the project for the Arc de Triomphe.
In March 1958, Christo arrived in Paris where he created his first packaged cans. Everything started with a small empty paint can, many of which were lying around his studio. Christo wrapped the trivial object in a resin-soaked canvas, tied it up and coated the result with a mixture of glue, varnish and sand and a thin layer of dark black and brown lacquer.
Considering the fact that Christo always contrasted his wrapped cans with unwrapped versions, it quickly becomes apparent that he was interested not only in the concealment of the object but also in the comparative analysis of the three-dimensional qualities of different objects, surfaces and materials. He had the choice of wrapping the boxes or painting them. He left some unchanged, so that the company name or at least part of it could still be read under the many paint stains.
The first of these sets was limited to just two cans, but soon entire groups appeared, consisting of a variety of packaged, painted, unmodified cans and bottles. It is important to mention that none of the works are set on a pedestal, implying that Christo did not explicitly prescribe the arrangement of the individual components. In fact, the cans, now spread among the collections, were once part of a large installation of unmodified, painted, packaged cans, bottles, and boxes that Christo made between 1958 and 1960 entitled Inventaire. All of the works were originally designed to be displayed in the corner of a room as a set, roughly comparable to the household inventory that is stacked in the corner of a room when moving into a new home.
In addition to the fact that the work was fragmented into its separate parts, there is the aggravating circumstance that only fragments of the many pieces still exist today. When Christo and Jeanne-Claude moved to New York in 1964 and could not pay the rent on their cellar in Gentilly, suburb of Paris, their landlord threw all the work in the trash. The only reason some of the cans, bottles and barrels survived is that Christo had several small studios and storage rooms at the time, including a basement room next to the apartment owned by Jeanne-Claude's mother. It is believed, however, that the many boxes, of which only a few black and white and color photos exist today, were all destroyed.
Christo
Wrapped Cans, 1958-60
Set of 4 metal boxes, fabric, cord, lacquer and sand
Estimate: 80 000 / 120 000 €
- Christo et Jeanne-Claude : Early Works 1958-1964 de Matthias Koddenberg
