Among Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s most celebrated series are the Store Fronts from the early and mid-1960s, whereby the couple would construct a façade for a gallery or other sidewalk-facing space that gave air of a closed commercial space by nature of its covered up store-like vitrines. In doing so, the interior/exterior relationship of that space is halted and redefined, as is the viewer’s place in the dynamic of indoor/outdoor space.

As noted by Lawrence Alloway, “the store fronts radiate a kind of suspense, as if the blocked windows or the closed door might admit one if you only knew the hours of opening. However, our perceptual and physical links are arrested as the invitation stays unfulfilled. What Christo [and Jeanne-Claude] have done is to turn physical space into psychological response, as the façade becomes a wall, absolutely canceling the inside… They cancel the internal space that we anticipate and define space as what is between us and the glass. The spectator’s investigative, voyeuristic impulse is converted into an experience of himself, as an object in space.”