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The Christo Interviews
Publishing September 2024, HENI is delighted to present Hans Ulrich Obrist’s new book The Christo Interviews, a collection of illustrated conversations between two of the art world's most esteemed figures, featuring previously unpublished material and Christo’s last ever interview, recorded shortly before his passing.
A compact hardback book, The Christo Interviews brings together a series of conversations between Hans Ulrich Obrist, the pre-eminent commentator on and curator of contemporary art, and Christo, the artist who is best known for the large-scale, site-specific environmental installations he created in collaboration with artistic partner and wife, Jeanne-Claude.
Taking place between December 2012 and May 2020, the interviews provide insight into the individual minds of two of the art world’s most esteemed figures, while also tracking the unfolding of their entire working relationship. Obrist describes these as ‘werksttat interviews’, meaning ‘a workshop or laboratory of words’ and taken together, they also reveal the progress of The London Mastaba, Serpentine Lake, Hyde Park (2016-18), Christo’s first major public outdoor work in the UK, which coincided with an exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries outlining Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s 60-year history of working with oil barrels.
The second collection of monographic interviews by Obrist to be published by HENI, following The Richter Interviews (2023), this reading book is edited in close collaboration with the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation and is fully illustrated with images of finished works, drawings and archival photographs from throughout the duo’s long and successful career.
Publication:
September 2024
Illustrations:
80
Dimensions:
210 x 135 mm
Format:
Hardback
ISBN:
978-1-912122-81-3
No. of pages:
216
Hans Ulrich Obrist is a world-renowned curator and the artistic director of the Serpentine Galleries in London. Alongside his curatorial practice, Obrist has written extensively on and around contemporary art, with a particular interest in the interview format.
Christo (Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, 1935–2020) was an American-Bulgarian artist best known for his monumental site-specific public art projects. Studying under the Communist regime during the 1950s at the Sofia National Academy of Art, Christo escaped to the West through Prague, Vienna and Geneva. In 1958 he arrived in Paris where he met Jeanne-Claude (Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, 1935–2009), who became his wife and lifelong artistic collaborator. In 1964, the artist couple moved to New York where they lived and worked together all their lives.