Lost ‘cloud’ of artist who wrapped the Reichstag to be created in UK gallery

Christo once wrapped up the Reichstag, suspended a curtain across a Colorado valley and covered up the Pont Neuf in Paris. Now, six years after the artist’s death, a London gallery is to create a monumental installation he designed in 1968, using a detailed scale model and drawings that had been presumed lost until their chance discovery.

Christo had imagined a vast, internally illuminated suspended form, like a cloud, but technical constraints meant the plan was never brought to fruition.

Package on a Ceiling was conceived for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia. Now its first realisation will fill a huge exhibition space at Gagosian London in a collaboration with the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation.

The piece will fill the full volume of the space – 16 metres long, 10 metres wide – descending to just above head height.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 2002 with photographs of some of their work. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty

Serena Cattaneo Adorno, a senior director at Gagosian, said: “Both architectural and atmospheric, it compels visitors to move beneath and around it.”

She added: “This exhibition brings a work into being that has existed for decades only as an idea. The gesture of wrapping is one of the most radical aspects of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s practice; here, it is applied to air and architectural surface – a distillation of their thinking to its purest form.”

The original plans were discovered by Lorenza Giovanelli, who joined Christo’s team in 2017 as his studio manager. While creating more space within the busy studio, she moved a large plinth and suddenly noticed a box within its hollow. To her astonishment, it contained a detailed scale model of Package on a Ceiling, mocked up in a gallery maquette complete with electrical wiring to convey the work’s lighting elements.

Its discovery in 2018 was never revealed, and Christo died in 2020. She recalled his excitement as he had long ago forgotten placing it in that plinth and had moved on to other works. She said: “It’s in such great condition because it’s never seen the sunlight. It was not even dusty … It’s been hidden for 50 years.”