site.btaUnfinished Christo and Jeanne-Claude Projects to Be Displayed in Munster, Germany

Over one hundred unfinished projects by Christo and Jeanne-Claude will be exhibited at the Pablo Picasso Museum in the German city of Munster, the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation said on Monday. The exhibition is the first of its kind to be held in Germany.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude: unrealised will open on April 4 and continue until June 28, 2026. It presents projects by the artists that, despite years of planning and intensive negotiations, were never realised.

More than one hundred projects spanning six decades and curated by Matthias Kodenberg reveal how Christo and his wife Jeanne-Claude prepared their artistic and social messages, from the design phase through a creative journey often marked by resistance and failure.

The collection features items from the New York-based Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation as well as private and public collections. It offers a comprehensive view of the artists’ boundless creativity and persistence, as they frequently faced technical, legal and administrative obstacles for decades while trying to realize their projects.

One of the projects included in the Munster exhibition is Mastaba. Since 1958, Christo and Jeanne-Claude have created not only fabric works but also sculptures from stacked barrels. A key form became their dominant motif: the mastaba, a rectangular structure with two sides sloping outwards and a flat roof, resembling a truncated pyramid. Since 1977, they have planned a monumental, permanent mastaba in a desert area of the United Arab Emirates. Despite decades of preparation, the project remained unfinished. After Christo’s death, the foundation continues to seek the necessary permits.

The Sant’Angelo Bridge, Rome’s oldest bridge crossing the Tiber and linking the Vatican with the city, was the first bridge Christo and Jeanne-Claude intended to wrap in 1967. Christo conceived the project while preparing a solo exhibition at the National Gallery of Modern Art in Rome. He and Jeanne-Claude worked on the idea for more than two years before deciding to focus on Pont Neuf, the oldest bridge in Paris, where they completed the wrapping project in 1985.

Another unrealized idea is Over the River, a project for the Arkansas River in Colorado. For more than 20 years, Christo and Jeanne-Claude developed the concept of stretching shimmering silver fabric panels along a 9.5-kilometre stretch of the river. Although all necessary permits were obtained in 2011, ongoing lawsuits with opponents led Christo to abandon the project in 2017.

The upcoming Munster exhibition clearly shows that for Christo and Jeanne-Claude failure was not the opposite of success but an integral part of their artistic self-discovery. The unfinished projects are no less significant aesthetically, politically or socially than completed works, with their impact evident even at the design stage, the foundation said.