Christo - Contemporary Art Part II New York Friday, November 16, 2007 | Phillips

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  • 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

170

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.

Estimate
$200,000 - 300,000 

Sold for $253,000

Contemporary Art Part II

16 Nov 2007, 10am & 2pm
New York