LONDON — Gagosian London will stage a realization of Christo's 1968 work "Air Package on a Ceiling" from 21 May to 21 August at its 20 Grosvenor Hill gallery, using the artist's original scale model and drawings. The installation will fill the full volume of the exhibition space, measuring 16 metres long and 10 metres wide and descending to just above head height.

The work was conceived by Christo in 1968 for the Institute of Contemporary Art in Philadelphia but was never built because of technical constraints. The exhibition is a collaboration with the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation and will include other works on the theme of air.

Serena Cattaneo Adorno, senior director at Gagosian, said: "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 scale model was discovered in Christo's studio in 2018 by Lorenza Giovanelli, who had joined the artist's team in 2017 as studio manager. The maquette had been mocked up complete with electrical wiring to convey the lighting elements of the proposed work, and had remained hidden for roughly 50 years.

"It's in such great condition because it's never seen the sunlight," Giovanelli said of the model. "It was not even dusty."

Christo and Jeanne-Claude were known for monumental, temporary public artworks that transformed landscapes using everyday materials, with each project involving years of planning before being dismantled and recycled. Their realized projects included the wrapping of the Reichstag in Berlin in 1995, a curtain suspended across a Colorado valley, and the covering of the Pont Neuf in Paris. Christo died in 2020.