Paul Goldberger

Adam Blackbourn

From June 18 to September 23, 2018, London's Hyde Park will host Christo and Jeanne-Claude's newest installation: The Mastaba (Project for London, Hyde Park, Serpentine Lake). The temporary sculpture takes cues from mastabas of the first urban civilizations of Mesopotamia, which were mud benches with two vertical sides, two slanted sides, and a flat top. Towering at 20 meters high, its 500 tons anchored to the Serpentine Lake, this waterborne project will gather 7,506 painted oil barrels to create a floating mosaic of red, white, blue, and mauve. The most ambitious of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's barrel works to date, The London Mastaba is a precursor to the duo's work in progress The Mastaba (Project for Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates). First conceived in 1977, The Mastaba for Abu Dhabi, if realized, would be Christo and Jeanne-Claude's greatest achievement and only permanent large-scale work. Situated in the desert and made of 410,000 multicolored barrels, the 150-meter-high sculpture would be the largest in the world, rising higher than the Great Pyramid of Giza. Through drawings, collages, photographs, sculptures, and scale models, this book traces the 60-year trajectory of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's interest in the form of the barrel and the mastaba. A coinciding exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries is curated by Hans Ulrich Obrist and Melissa Blanchflower with Joseph Constable, in close collaboration with Josy Kraft and Christo's studio. This book, designed by Lorenza Giovanelli and Christo himself, spans Christo and Jeanne-Claude's history of barrel artworks from 1958 to 2018. It includes Christo's earliest preparatory drawings and most recent works, gathering photographs by Wolfgang Volz, maps, technical data, and drawings, many published here for the first time.

Adam Blackbourn

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