The London Mastaba: Christo’s 7,506-Barrel Sculpture on the Serpentine

ART & CULTURE · LONDON

Reading time: 10 min

Twenty metres of painted steel oil barrels, floating on a raft of submerged cubes anchored to the bed of the Serpentine. Christo built The London Mastaba from a shape he had been trying to realise permanently in the desert since 1977, and a material he had first stacked on a German dockside in 1961. Nearly five decades of unfinished ambition arrived, briefly, on a lake in Hyde Park.

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For just over three months in the summer of 2018, Hyde Park’s Serpentine Lake carried a trapezoidal wall of colour twenty metres high. The London Mastaba, built from 7,506 painted oil barrels stacked onto a floating platform, was Christo‘s first major work realised in the United Kingdom, on show from 18 June to 23 September 2018. It floated on interlocking cubes anchored to the lakebed by thirty-two six-tonne anchors, weighed 600 tonnes, and occupied just under one per cent of the lake’s surface.

The barrels themselves were the point. Christo and his late collaborator and wife, Jeanne-Claude, had been building with stacked oil barrels since 1961, and had spent decades trying to realise a permanent version of this same trapezoidal form, at a vastly larger scale, in the desert outside Abu Dhabi. The Serpentine sculpture ran alongside a companion exhibition at the Serpentine South Gallery, Christo and Jeanne-Claude: Barrels and The Mastaba 1958 to 2018, which traced that whole history in drawings, collages and scale models.

What follows is the design argument behind a sculpture that looked, to a passer-by crossing the Serpentine Bridge, like an abstract wall of red, blue and mauve. It was also the closest either artist ever got to building, at real scale and in public, an idea that had occupied them since the 1970s.

A wall of barrels, built to change with the light

The London Mastaba took its name and its silhouette directly from its shape: a mastaba is a flat-topped, trapezoidal structure, wider at the base than at the top, with two vertical short ends and two long sloping sides. Christo and Jeanne-Claude used it as their signature form for the best part of six decades.

On the Serpentine, that geometry was built from 7,506 individually painted oil barrels, stacked and secured onto a steel frame that sat on a floating base of interlocking cubes. The two vertical end walls, facing the bridge and the Diana Memorial Fountain respectively, showed a mosaic of red, blue and mauve barrel ends. The two long sloping sides, visible from the towpaths on either bank, were red with a white horizontal stripe running around each barrel, so that the same sculpture read as a saturated abstract mosaic from one angle and a striped, almost architectural wall from another. Christo described the effect as something that could not really be put into words, only walked around: “You know, it is all about senses, you can’t put it into words.”

That double reading was deliberate. Christo and his engineering team planned the barrel colours and viewing angles from the bridge, from the banks, and from the water itself, so the sculpture behaved differently depending on where in the park a visitor stood, and at what hour. Early morning light on the mauve and blue barrel ends did a different job to the flat red of the sloping sides at midday. Nothing about the surface was fixed; it moved with London’s weather, which is precisely what a floating sculpture in a London park was always going to have to answer for.

From a Cologne dockside to a Hyde Park lake

The oil barrel had been part of Christo’s material vocabulary since before he met Jeanne-Claude’s wider practice took shape. In 1961, working in Cologne, the couple’s Dockside Packages and Stacked Oil Barrels installation piled stacked, wrapped barrels on the harbour front, using the same industrial container that would define six decades of their work. It was an unglamorous material to build a public art career on: a standardised steel drum, made to hold oil rather than to be looked at, chosen because it was cheap, modular and endlessly repeatable.

Barrels reappeared through the following decades in projects that never made it past the proposal stage. In 1967 the artists designed an unrealised barrel wall for the Suez Canal; in 1968 they proposed a barrel structure for the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Both survive only as drawings and collages, the medium through which Christo funded almost everything he built. The Serpentine exhibition that ran alongside The London Mastaba put these unrealised barrel projects on public view together with the finished sculpture outside, effectively showing the audience the sixty years of thinking that sat behind a wall of barrels floating a few hundred metres away.

Why a tomb shape, and why it had to be this one

The mastaba form itself predates the barrels by even longer. Christo traced its name to the Arabic word for a mud bench, the kind built outside houses across the Middle East, which was in turn adopted by archaeologists to describe the flat-topped, sloped-sided tombs that ancient Egyptian builders constructed as precursors to the pyramid. “Mastaba is the old name of the mud bench found at the first urban place we know in the world, in Mesopotamia,” Christo said of the form. He and Jeanne-Claude were drawn to it, among the geometric vocabulary available to a sculptor, because it read as genuinely ancient and man-made at once: ubiquitous enough to be legible anywhere, yet not a shape borrowed from the natural world.

They first proposed a permanent mastaba for the desert outside Abu Dhabi in 1977, a structure intended to reach roughly 150 metres high and to be built from more than 400,000 painted oil barrels, several orders of magnitude larger than anything they had built before. The proposal moved between potential sites over the following decades, including locations considered in Rome, Otterlo and Kassel, before settling on its intended home at Al Gharbia in Abu Dhabi’s Western Region. Jeanne-Claude was still working on the project with Christo when she died in November 2009. Christo continued developing it alone for another decade, describing his and Jeanne-Claude’s work, even after her death, as an unbroken joint authorship rather than something he had inherited and made his own.

Building a floating island for three months

Engineering a 600-tonne sculpture to float safely on a public lake required a different discipline entirely from painting a barrel. The structure sat on a base of interlocking cubes, largely submerged beneath the waterline, which distributed the weight of the barrels above across a wide enough footprint that the whole assembly floated rather than sank. Thirty-two anchors, each weighing six tonnes, were sunk into the lakebed to hold the platform in position against wind and current over its three-month run. The steel frame that carried the stacked barrels was built by Coventry Scaffolding, with the floating structure engineered by JK Basel and Deep Dive Systems and the wider engineering overseen by the German firm Schlaich Bergermann Partner, the same practice that has worked on several of Christo’s large-scale projects. Construction began on 3 April 2018, more than two months before the public unveiling, and the sculpture was fully dismantled by the start of November that year.

Christo treated the lake itself as part of the brief rather than simply a site to occupy. He personally funded ecological improvements to the Serpentine alongside the installation, including new habitat baskets and refuges for herons and other waterfowl, bat boxes on the banks, the removal of excess phosphate to reduce algae growth, and a deep clean of the lakebed once the sculpture came down. One project director involved in the restoration put the intention plainly: the lake was to be left in better condition than it had been found.

Paid for entirely by the artist

Every large-scale project Christo and Jeanne-Claude built was funded the same way: through the sale of Christo’s preparatory drawings, collages and scale models, never through sponsorship, and never through public money. The London Mastaba was no exception. Though it was timed to run alongside the Serpentine Galleries’ summer exhibition and shown on land managed by The Royal Parks, the sculpture itself, reported to have cost in the region of four million dollars, was financed entirely by Christo, with free public access guaranteed as a condition of how he chose to build. “I won’t give a millimetre of my freedom away and damage my art,” he said of the arrangement. “Nobody commissions these things, they are decided by us.”

That independence was not incidental to the work. It meant nobody but Christo decided where the anchors went, what colour the barrels were painted, or when the sculpture came down. For an artist whose entire practice depended on persuading planning authorities, park managers and engineers to let him build something enormous and temporary in a public space, owning the entire budget was the leverage that made the persuading possible.

A practice that outlived its authorship

Jeanne-Claude’s death in November 2009 did not end the projects she and Christo had started together. Christo continued to describe every subsequent work, including The London Mastaba, as theirs jointly, a position he held until his own death in New York on 31 May 2020, at the age of eighty-four. He was, by his own account, still standing at his drafting table sixteen or seventeen hours a day into his eighties, working through a body of proposals that stretched back nearly sixty years.

The clearest evidence of how far that continuity extended arrived the year after his death. L’Arc de Triomphe, Wrapped, a project Christo had been developing before he died, was completed in Paris in September and October 2021 by his studio, led by his nephew Vladimir Yavachev, exactly as he had planned it. That same studio and the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation later worked directly with the artist JR on La Caverne du Pont Neuf, JR’s 2026 homage to the couple’s 1985 wrapping of the same Paris bridge, a project that shared Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s insistence on financing public art entirely through the sale of an artist’s own work. The London Mastaba sits inside that same continuity: a sculpture built and signed by one half of a partnership, on behalf of both.

The proof the desert mastaba still needs

The detail that was impossible to know in 2018 is what would happen to its much larger sibling in the years afterwards. The permanent mastaba proposed for Abu Dhabi in 1977, the 150-metre structure of 410,000 barrels that the London sculpture was always a study for, remains unbuilt. As of early 2026, curator Matthias Koddenberg, who has worked closely with the Christo and Jeanne-Claude Foundation on the project’s archive, has described it as at “a very advanced stage” in engineering and design terms, without final construction approval, with the foundation still holding the complete specifications Christo left behind. Its realisation has grown less certain rather than more, as regional instability has complicated the kind of decades-long planning permission the project needs.

That makes The London Mastaba something more than a scaled-down preview. Barrel for barrel, it used roughly one fifty-fourth of the material proposed for the desert structure, and reached a little over a tenth of its intended height, and it remains, nearly fifty years after Christo and Jeanne-Claude first drew the Abu Dhabi mastaba, the only version of that specific idea either artist ever got to see built at any real scale, in public, in their own lifetime. Everything the Serpentine sculpture proved about how a mastaba of oil barrels actually looks in changing light, floats on water and reads from a bridge was proof of concept for a building that still, as things stand, exists only on paper.

Final thoughts

It would be easy to describe The London Mastaba as a summer spectacle: a bright, photogenic wall of barrels on a London lake, there for a season and then gone. That was true, as far as it went. What it leaves out is the fifty years of thinking that arrived on the Serpentine already finished, in every respect except scale. Christo and Jeanne-Claude spent six decades with the same barrel and the same shape, refining a form they first tried to build permanently in the desert before most of the sculpture’s London visitors were born.

Christo built The London Mastaba as Jeanne-Claude’s collaborator even after her death, funding it the same way they had always funded their work and holding to the same insistence that nobody but the two of them would decide what got built. The permanent version they set out to build in 1977 is still, as things stand, unbuilt. The temporary one on the Serpentine is the only place either of them ever got to see the idea finished.