Bulgarian sculptor and designer, born in Gabrova, Bulgaria. Studied at the Academy of Fine Arts, Sofia 1951-56. After a single term at the Academy of Fine Arts, Vienna, he moved to Paris in 1958. Whilst there he became a member of the Nouveaux Realites group and founded the magazine KWY with Rene Bertholo, Sergio Fernandez and Jan Voss. In 1964 Christo moved to New York. He is most famous for originating 'packaging art', which involved the wrapping of familiar objects in canvas or plastic and labeling them works of art. He began this process in 1958. The earlier works were small in scale but his work soon developed in size to include trees, cars and even architecture. To Christo, wrapping is a temporary act which transforms an object by partially concealing the object and so revealing the essential forms beneath the packaging. In the early 1960's Christo made a number of assemblages of oil drums culminating in a project which saw him stack 1,249,000 oil drums at Houston, Texas in 1969. In the same year he famously packaged the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago. From 1964 he became interested in designing shop fronts and in 1968 he made a series of aluminium shop fronts for the Documenta exhibition in Kassel.