And the exhibits include one of the very few barrel structures still existing because most of them got destroyed when Christo and Jeanne-Claude moved to New York,вЂќ Giovanelli said. вЂњThe moment you look at these early works you cannot help being fascinated they have such a strong physical presence. The couple moved to New York in 1964, spending their first three years there as illegal immigrants. It is Christo before Christo.вЂќД¬hristoвЂ™s storeroom in the basement of Jeanne-ClaudeвЂ™s apartment at 4 Avenue Raymond PoincarГ©, Paris, 1960 Photograph: RenГ© BertholoД«orn Christo Vladimirov Javacheff in Bulgaria, the artist studied in Sofia but defected to the west in 1957, stowing away on a train from Prague to Vienna and on via Geneva to Paris, where he met Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon, who became his wife and artistic partner until her death in 2009.

There was always a missing piece of the puzzle, how Christo got there and this is it. She added: вЂњItвЂ™s a different Christo we see here to the one people know and are used to seeing. From these items we can see the artistic journey and how he arrived at some of his seminal works.вЂќ Everyone associates Christo with wrapping but here you realise how much he was influenced by the atmosphere he was surrounded with in Paris when he arrived from Bulgaria and saw this avant garde artistic work everywhere. вЂњItвЂ™s a chance to see some of the items he created and experimented with before the iconic wrapped pieces. Lorenza Giovanelli, the director of the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Studio based in New York, where the couple lived, said the exhibition provided a missing piece of the Christo puzzle. The event, at the Gagosian gallery, a short walk from the artistвЂ™s first studio, will display 25 artworks created by Christo before his collaboration with his wife, Jeanne-Claude, between 19. Today, two years after his death, some of the rare and rarely seen works, many of them creative experiments that would later find expression in far larger projects вЂ“ including the wrapping of the Arc de Triomphe last October вЂ“ feature in a new exhibition in Paris. Photograph: Serpentine Galleries В© 1959 Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation

The exposition