The Floating Piers installation, that will be set up and open to viewers on Lake Iseo from June 18 to July 3, 2016, marks Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s return to Italy after forty years.
The Floating Piers
Christo returns to Italy with a major installation: 70,000 sqm of orange fabric will lead visitors along a three-kilometer route across the Lake Iseo waters and its shores.
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- 18 February 2016
- Brescia
The installation will lead visitors along a three-kilometer route across the Lake’s waters and along its shores. The work will consist of 70,000 square meters of shimmering orange fabric covering a sequence of 16-meter-wide modular floating piers made with 200,000 cubes of high-density polyethylene. The itinerary will stretch across land and water, from Sulzano to Monte Isola, also comprising the Island of San Paolo.
Opening April 7 in the 2,000 square meter spaces of Santa Giulia Museum, Brescia, the show “Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Water Projects” – curated by Celant in collaboration with the artist and his studio – will offer an unprecedented display of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s water-related projects, that is those based on rural and urban landscapes characterized by the presence of water in the form of an ocean, a sea, a lake, or a river.
With over 150 exhibits comprising the artists’ original preparatory studies, drawings and collages, complemented by scale-models, photos of the finished projects, videos, and films, “Christo and Jeanne-Claude. Water Projects” presents a chronological display of the artists’ monumental works since the early Sixties and illustrates, across the large museum rooms, their seven Water Projects, from Wrapped Coast, One Million Square Feet, Little Bay, Sydney, Australia, 1968-1969 to The Floating Piers, Project for Lake Iseo, Italy, 2014-16. The exhibition aims at presenting the projects within a historical framework, contextualizing their evolution, from 1961 to the present day, illustrating the artists’ water-related works in their different stages of realization, from the first concept sketches, to the drawings, collages and models that follow, all the way to the actual realization of the work documented in the form of photos and videos.
The exhibition will also include an informative and interactive section opening in June, documenting the Lake Iseo environmental art project in the making; in this section viewers will have the chance to see video projections and a display of materials (also virtual) by the artist, all related to the project’s realization process, alongside a live streaming of photos and videos posted by the viewers visiting the installation on the Lake.
7 April – 18 September 2016
Christo and Jeanne-Claude – Water Projects
Curator: Germano Celant
Museo di Santa Giulia, Brescia
18 June – 3 July 2016
The Floating Piers
Lake Iseo