The Gates (Project for Central Park, New York City)

The Gates embodied the transcendent ephemerality that characterised the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude. For sixteen days, New York City’s Central Park ‘bloomed’ with 7,503 gates from which saffron-colour fabric panels were suspended; the colour was inspired by Torii, the structures flanking the entrance walkways to Japanese Shinto shrines (‘The Gates’, Christo and Jeanne-Claude, https://christojeanneclaude.net/artworks/the-gates/). Throughout the park the gates snaked, a shock of colour brightening the wintery ground through which visitors strolled and meandered. The artwork took more than three decades to realise, a process which the present work memorialises. Indeed, The Gates (Project for Central Park, New York City) shows measurements and preliminary sketches, underscoring just how meticulous Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s methods were. As Christo liked to note, ‘…our projects have the two distinct periods: the software period and the hardware period. The software period is where the work exists in the mind of the thousand people who try to stop us and the thousand people who try to help us. And this is the period when the work exists only in the mind and in the drawings. And then there is the hardware period, where the project gets built’ (Christo interviewed by B. Rose, Interview, 10 March 2014).