'Alien mothership': Christo's mastaba floats on London's Serpentine

“This is not normal art … it is all about beauty,” said the artist Christo as a 600-tonne, 20-metre high floating sculpture made from more than 7,000 colourful oil barrels was unveiled on London’s Serpentine, gently bobbing amid ducks, swans and early morning swimmers.

The artist is known for spectacularly ambitious and slightly mad projects, which have included wrapping the German Reichstag in fabric and stretching a vast curtain over a valley between two mountains in Colorado.

The new work is his first outdoor public installation in the UK and takes the shape of a mastaba, a trapezoid shape which originated in Mesopotamia 6,000 to 7,000 years ago. It is the Arabic word for bench.

The work has been constructed over the last two months on the banks of the Serpentine, the red, blue and mauve coloured barrels individually put in place using a crane. Over the weekend it was floated out into the centre of the lake, tethered by 32 6-tonne anchors. In three months time, it will be gone.

Christo said he hoped it would be like a huge abstract painting in the middle of London, its colours changing with the light and weather.

The Mastaba’s unmissable reality was important. “It is the visual senses, the physical senses, the wind, the water,” the Bulgarian-born artist said. “It is the real things, not the television, not computer images, not virtual reality.

“I love the real world. I cannot stand the virtual reality. I have no stool in my studio, I stand 16 hours a day, I have no elevator in my building … I do not know how to drive. I do not like to talk on the telephone. I like to see real things today because the art world is full of virtual, insensible things … here we are with the wind, with the sun, with the wet, with the cold … the real things.”

Christo, with his late wife, Jeanne-Claude, has been using oil barrels in his work for around 60 years, a subject explored in more detail at an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery, a few minutes walk from the work, opening to the public on Tuesday.

It tells the story of Christo’s bigger ambition, held since 1977, to build a barrelled mastaba six times the size of the London one in the Abu Dhabi desert. It would be the biggest sculpture in the world.

That is one of his many unrealised projects but Christo, a ball of energy who celebrated his 83rd birthday last week, is optimistic. “I am a very stubborn man and I hope to do it … it has been over 40 years but I very much believe I can. It is an unstoppable urge,” he said.

The London work, which is 30 metres wide and 40 metres long, has the feel of a newly arrived mothership from an alien planet. Everyone expects it to divide opinion. An hour before its formal unveiling a woman walking to work by the lake could be heard on her mobile complaining: “I don’t like it … the reason I come this way is because of the nature.”

Michael Bloomberg, a former mayor of New York and the chairman of the Serpentine Galleries, conceded that you cannot please everybody. “If you designed your life to avoid controversy you would be back in the stone age. It will be interesting to hear what that person says in two months … it could be ‘I’ve always liked it’.”

He said it took 26 years to get Christo’s Gates project in New York’s Central Park and it lasted only 16 days. “It had a phenomenally big impact on the city. People from around the world came but also people didn’t think of the city as a place where culture and art and innovation takes place so the impact goes on for a very long time.

“London has a reputation and this [The Mastaba] enhances that reputation of being open and edgy and willing to try new things.”

Bloomberg predicted the work would provide a big economic boost, as well as a cultural one, to London. “It will add new energy to the city, it will help people see the familiar in a new light and provoke conversations and debate … I think it’s fair to say that no two people will have the same reaction to it and that is exactly how great art should be.”

• The Mastaba will be in the Serpentine, Hyde Park, until 23 September.