Packed Tree (Project)

Before he became internationally renowned for his environmental installations, Christo honed his skills in his native Bulgaria where he studied at the renowned Fine Arts Academy in Sofia before defecting to the west, via Prague, in 1957. His Bulgaria drawings depict a wide range of individuals from his home country including soldiers, and farm and industrial workers, as well as the sites in which they labored-- his father managed a local textile factory. In addition to fifteen rarely seen drawings from this period, this trove of sketches includes drawings for the artist's next significant body of work-- wrapped objects and storefronts begun after his move to Paris in 1958. Though his career has come to be epitomized by monumental site-specific installations, this corpus shows Christo's remarkable skill as a draftsman, revealing the sustained importance of drawing throughout his oeuvre. Seen together in drawn form, his wrapped sculptures begin to resemble personages while his early portraits foreshadow the later drawings' focus on quasi-anthropomorphic solitary objects.