Roll out the barrels

It’s not a wrap. This is the first thing to note about the huge trapezoid thing that has appeared, apparently floating, on the Serpentine Lake. Many of the projects by the artists who conceived it, Christo and his late wife and collaborator Jeanne-Claude, have involved bundling something up in a temporary mantle. The items thus packaged over the years include a naked woman (in Düsseldorf, 1964), the Pont Neuf (1985) and, famously, in 1995, the Reichstag.

This London work, however, is the product of an equally long-running obsession with the barrels in which oil is stored and transported. At first, and second, glance, these objects lack charm. Nonetheless, the youthful Christo — a Bulgarian who fled the communist regime and settled in Paris — used to lug them up the stairs to his top-floor studio.

There he arranged them into simple minimalist sculptures resembling pillars. Sometimes he would wrap them in cloth (a selection of these early efforts is on show in a concurrent exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery). These failed to sell and the artist threw many away — not a great loss on this evidence. But then Christo had not yet worked out what to do with his barrels.

Soon after, he added an extra ingredient — colour — and thought of piling them up in the real world outside his studio. Beginning in a small way, he blocked a narrow Parisian street with a barricade of the things (the police asked him to take them away, which he did). But from the 1970s, he and Jeanne-Claude proposed a series of much more imposing structures composed of row after row of barrels, laid on their sides to make an oblong mass with sloping ends and a flat top.