Wrapped Girl is a preparatory work for Christo’s staging of a living ‘sculpture’ at the Institute of Contemporary art, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia in October 1968 (see photographs of the event below).

In in his series Wrapped Women which he realised from 1962 onward, and his fashion designs, which he developed after 1965, Christo, aimed to challenge and question society’s entrenched ideas when it came to the naked female form. He had no interest in creating extreme physical experiences, inflicting physical pain, or injuring the body. In Christo's art, the body, or more precisely the female body, is first and foremost an aesthetic ‘material’ for his work. His art is not sensationalist, nor is it a political statement, happening, or performance. The act of wrapping, the way in which women are wrapped and tied up, is sensual in Christo’s work. It is never humiliating, brutal, nor destructive. Therefore, in a sense, Christo’s approach is much closer to the classical nude—except that he does not use models to make a painting or a sculpture. In his creations, the model itself is the work of art.