Christo and Jeanne-Claude
The Wall - 13,000 Oil Barrels
Gasometer, Oberhausen, Germany 1999

Christo and Jeanne-Claude have created an installation and premiere two exhibitions of documentation inside the Gasometer. It opened on May 1,1999 in Oberhausen, Germany. The works remained until mid-October 1999.

The Gasometer is one of the largest tank structures in the world. It was built in 1928 to store the gaseous by-products of iron ore processing. The Gasometer has recently been used as exhibit and event space. The round structure is 110 meter (360 feet) high by 68 meters (223 feet) in diameter.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude's installation is:
The Wall, 13,000 Oil Barrels

The Wall bisects the Gasometer into two halves. The oil barrel structure is 26 meters (85 feet) tall and 68 meters (223 feet) wide with a depth of 7.23 meters (24 feet).

Sharing the Gasometer with the installation is the first public exhibition of documentation of:

The Umbrellas, Japan-USA, 1984-91 Documentation Exhibition
Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1971-95 Documentation Exhibition

The use of oil barrels follows a tradition in the work of Christo and Jeanne-Claude including:

Wrapped Oil Barrels, 1958

Stacked Oil Barrels and Dockside Package, 1961, Cologne, Germany

Barrels Structures, 1962, Gentilly, France

Wall of Oil Barrels-The Iron Curtain, June 1962, Rue Visconti, Paris

56 Oil Barrels Structure 1966, donated by Martin and Mia Visser to the Kröller-Müller Museum, Otterlo, Holland

The Mastaba of 1,240 Oil Barrels, 1968, Institute of Contemporary Art, Philadelphia

The Mastaba for the United Arab Emirates. Started in 1979, this work features 400,000 oil barrels in a structure 150 meters (492 feet) high, with a base of 300 meters (984 feet) by 225 meters (738 feet). This project has not yet been completed.

The two exhibitions showed the chronology of Christo and Jeanne-Claude's temporary works of art from their conception to their completion. They included original preparatory drawings, collages, scale models, and examples of the materials used in the projects: steel, aluminum, fabric and rope, technical, engineering and legal documents, as well as a large number of color and black and white photographs of the negotiations, installation and completion.

The construction of The Wall was organized by Wolfgang Volz.

The IBA Emscher Park Organization was founded by the state of North Rhine, Westfalia in 1989 to improve the infrastructure of the Ruhrgebiet. That organization's last act was its invitation to Christo and Jeanne-Claude to install: The Wall, 13,600 Oil Barrels and the two documentation exhibitions: The Umbrellas, Japan-USA, 1984-91 and Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin, 1971-95.

The installation and exhibit transformed the already-unusual space of the Gasometer, providing new ways of experiencing its form and viewers' participation with it.