"Presence of the Missing"

Christo and Jeanne-Claude
Wrapped Trees, Fondation Beyeler and Berower Park,
Riehen, Switzerland 1997-98

Wrappings: remind me of elegance and death
it is like beauty comes full circle with its life span

Christo and Jean Claude are fascinating installation artists whose sketches can often be equally incredible. After viewing Christina Pettersson's pieces at MM Galleries and really processing them, I was brought back to Christo and Jean Claude. The bricks Pettersson draws and the flow of her bodies remind me of the couple's building wrapping sketches. The translucence of each is what attracts me. While one is a sketch for a future installation and the other a finished piece they both lead the viewer through new places of the past.


"The temporality of a work of art creates a feeling of fragility, vulnerability and an urgency to be seen, as well as a presence of the missing, because we know it will be gone tomorrow.

The quality of love and tenderness that human beings have towards what will not last - for instance the love and tenderness we have for childhood and our lives - is a quality we want to give to our work as an additional aesthetic quality." cited


Christina Pettersson
MM Galleries
Mirabile Visu
A graduate of RISD, recently moved back to southern Florida, where she grew up.


I get suspicious when viewing works done with only graphite or black ink. I question the integrity of the artist, wondering what they are saying or what the work says about their energy involved in the piece. After standing in front of Pettersson's graphite drawings, I found a depth convincing me that these images take one places. The visual subjects, bricks and people, each contain rich textures, finite detail, and a surrealist nature. The emptiness, created through the floating images and the simple medium, contributes to the depth.