Christo Javacheff was born in
Bulgaria in 1935, in the city of
Gabrovo. He studied
sculpture and
painting at the
Academy of Fine Arts in
Sofia, the capital of Bulgaria. By way of
Prague and
Vienna, he ended up in
Paris in
1958. Here he meets
Jeanne-Claude Guillebon, who happens to be born the very same day as himself. They start working together and still does so. This same year he starts
packaging things as art.
He moved to New York in 1964, where he were starting to receive more and more attention. Here he also started working with buildings. Four years later he wrapped a whole building - the Berner Kunsthalle.
Together with Jeanne-Claude, he now started doing larger and larger packages and projects, such as the famous Running Fence in California 1976. The following year they toured the world with an exhibition about the Running Fence project. This is now the way they work with all their projects, first several years of planning, then the installation, and finally a tour with an exhibition.
Their latest large-scale project was the Wrapped Reichstag in Berlin, 1995.