Beschreibung:

Christo Surrounded Islands (Project for Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida) 1981 Graphite, wax crayon, pastel, topographic map and technical data on paper in the artist’s Plexiglas box, in two parts. Top panel: 15 x 96 in. (38.1 x 243.8 cm); Lower panel: 42 x 96 in. (106.7 x 243.8 cm). Signed, titled and dated “Surrounded Islands (Project for Biscayne Bay, Greater Miami, Florida) Venetian Causeway, JuliaTuttle Causeway, 79th Street Causeway, Broad Causeway and Bavers Haulover Cut-10 Islands (length from 1200 feet to 600 feet) Christo 1981” along lower edge of top panel.
Provenance Acquired directly from the artist Catalogue Essay In a project they saw as an urban enterprise, the Christos set out to surround eleven man-made islands set squarely amidst the millions that populate Greater Miami, islands that were used mostly for dumping garbage. The preparations were long and complex, and involved, as in other projects, drawings, collages and photographs, as well as documentation and numerous meetings with government and local officials, in order to secure permissions. From April 1981, a team of attorneys, a marine engineer, four consulting engineers and a building contractor, a marine biologist, an ornithologist, and an expert on mammals, all worked steadily on preparing the Surrounded Islands Project. The landscape per se had been metamorphosed, for a short time, into another, beautiful reality, with luminous pink surrounds of fabric shining in breathtakingly unusual harmony with the tropical vegetation of the islands, the light of the Miami sky and the colors of the shallow waters of the bay. J. Baal-Teshuva, Christo & Jeanne-Claude, Cologne, 1995, p. 57 Read More