Christo, the primary artist and designer of the duo's projects, was born 13 June 1935 in Gabrovo, Bulgaria. His father, Vladimir Javacheff, was a scientist, and his mother, Tsveta Dimitrova, was a secretary at the Academy of Fine Arts in Sofia. Artists from the Academy who visited his family observed Christo's artistic talent while he was still of a very young age.

The story of Christo's parentage is a picaresque curiosity which illuminates the strangeness of life in mid-twentieth century Bulgaria. Christo was descended from a German immigrant to Bulgaria on his father's side. Christo's great-grandfather, the German Friedrich Fischer, had invented the modern process for mass-producing standard ball bearings and sent his son, Christo's grandfather Vitus Fischer, to Bulgaria to open the first ball bearing factory in Eastern Europe. Following the collapse of the project in disgrace--fourteen Bulgarian workers were killed in an industrial accident in the factory, and the lack of demand for ball bearings in the largely agricultural Bulgaria of the time led to financial ruin--Vitus Fischer, penniless and distrusted by the local police, took the name of Dmitri Javacheff (one of the laborers killed in the factory) and re-entered society under the assumed identity of a common, Bulgarian-born peasant working in a nearby milk production concern. Dmitri's son Vladimir Javacheff showed his grandfather's technological aptitude and became an academically successful, though still poverty-stricken, scientist in Bulgaria in the years before Christo's birth. Christo became aware of his secret German origins sometime in the 1970s, and after a brief lawsuit in the then-West German courts, he was awarded a forty-nine percent share in the inheritance of Friedrich Fischer. While this would make Christo a millionaire several times over even without his art career, he has chosen to live modestly off a portion of the proceeds from his art, reinvesting most of his occupational income and all of his inheritance from the Fischer ball bearing fortune into charitable organizations.
In his youth, Christo had an interest in theatre and staged Shakespeare plays. In 1953, he was admitted to the Academy of Fine Arts, but was disappointed by the strict socialist curriculum imposed by the ruling Communist Party at the time. He studied art at the Sofia Academy from 1952 to 1956, and for another year in Prague, Czechoslovakia (now Czech Republic) until 1957, when he escaped the Communist State by hiding himself in a truck transporting medicine to Austria.

Christo quickly settled in Vienna, and enrolled at the Viennese Academy of Fine Arts. After only one semester there, he traveled to Geneva and soon after moved to Paris. As a result of his flight, he lost his citizenship and became a stateless person. His life in Paris was characterized by financial hardship and social isolation, which was worsened by his difficulty learning the French language. He earned money by painting portraits, which he likened to prostitution. Visiting the city's galleries and museums, he was inspired by the work of Joan Miro, Nicholas de Stael, Jackson Pollock, Jean Tinguely, and most notably Jean Dubuffet.

In January 1958, Christo fabricated his first piece of wrapping art: He wrapped an empty paint tin with acrylic-soaked canvas, tied it, and colored it with glue, sand, and car paint. Years later, he remarked that he did not know why he created this piece. A German entrepreneur named Dieter Rosenkranz bought several of Christo's small-scale wrappings, and through Rosenkranz, Christo met artist Yves Klein and the art historian Pierre Restany.

Biographical information from Wikipedia