We round up eight of Christo and the late Jeanne-Claude's most arresting temporary art interventions from the past 50 years, as their first major UK sculpture is unveiled.
The art duo are famous for their large scale pieces that involve wrapping landmark buildings and landscapes in huge amounts of fabric, or creating temporary structures from colourful oil barrels.
Despite the best efforts of critics to ascribe specific meaning to their work, the artists always insisted that their pieces are simply about experiencing the artwork in the moment, in the context of its environment.
Christo and Jeanne-Claude looking for a possible site for The Mastaba in February 1982. Photo by Wolfgang Volz © 1982 Christo
Christo and Jeanne-Claude were born on the same day in 1935, Christo in Gabrovo, Bulgaria and Jeanne-Claude in Casablanca in Morocco. At the age of 21, Christo fled the Stalinist regime in his home country to Paris, where he met Jeanne-Claude in 1958 when he was commissioned to paint her mother's portrait. By 1961 they were collaborating on art works, in a romantic and artistic union that lasted until Jeanne-Claude's death in 2009. When she was still alive, the married couple were always careful to travel in separate planes so that if one were to perish in a crash the other would be able to continue their work.
Fiercely determined to retain complete artistic freedom, the pair self-funded their installations by selling original artworks and insisting on paying their assistants...