DOHA.- Gagosian announced the gallery’s participation in the inaugural edition of Art Basel Qatar with a solo presentation of early sculptural works by Christo from the late 1950s and early ’60s. The selection features notable works from his foundational Package and Wrapped Objects series that anticipate the large-scale projects produced in collaboration with Jeanne-Claude, which the couple would develop for the rest of their lives.

Gagosian’s presentation includes Wrapped Oil Barrels (1958–61), Package on a Luggage Rack (1962), Wrapped Painting (1962), Package (1963), Dolly (1964), and Applique Empaquetée (1963–81). These works feature ordinary objects sheathed in fabric or plastic and bound with rope or twine. Inspired by encounters with the era’s burgeoning avant-garde, Christo transformed the contours and surfaces of these found items, alternately obscuring and revealing their identities. Responding to domestic and urban environments, they disrupt our practical relationship with everyday artifacts, drawing attention to overlooked details through acts of concealment.

These works take on further meaning given Christo’s story of escaping Stalinist Bulgaria before settling in Paris, where he lived from 1958 before ultimately relocating to New York in 1964. In their focus on containment and displacement, they parallel the artist’s own circumscribed life at the time of their production. “I will be a displaced person all of my life,” he asserted. “To be a displaced person can be disorienting, but it can also be inspiring.” Alluding to impermanence and the safeguarding of personal belongings, they address themes of migration and adaptation. In a Middle Eastern setting, they also reference the capacity of architecture, textiles, and daily life to accommodate movement. Wrapped Painting also reminds us that Christo began his career as a painter but was already rejecting the discipline’s restrictions, while Dolly, made immediately after his arrival in New York, reflects his experience of transit.

The components of Wrapped Oil Barrels are of great significance in Christo’s oeuvre; he first made large-scale use of the containers to barricade a narrow Parisian street with Wall of Oil Barrels—The Iron Curtain, Rue Visconti, Paris (1961–62), producing a disruptive environmental installation that inferred multiple references, from the revolutionary history of Paris to the more recent protests against the Algerian War. Among the earliest of their monumental temporary artworks, this intervention was an important milestone in Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s redefinition of art’s relationship to public space, expanding the possibilities of scale and transforming familiar landscapes.

The abstract nature of the works on view at Art Basel Qatar resonate with a region in which, historically, architecture and textiles have taken precedence over pictorial art. The artists worked on projects for the Middle East beginning with their proposal in 1977 for The Mastaba, including unrealized works for Qatar such as 2017’s The Walk (Project for Doha). The Mastaba, Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s proposal for their only permanent public artwork, will be sited in an as-yet-undisclosed Middle Eastern desert location. Made from 410,000 barrels, it will be the largest contemporary sculpture by volume in the world—and the artists’ final constructed project.