Christian Boltanski is one of the most famous self-taught creators globally, originally from France and Paris. Christian was engaged in various types of art, starting with painting and sculpture in the classical sense and ending with photography and cinematography. He directly touched on the symbolic themes of the passage of time, memory, history, and collective and personal experience in his works. In particular, the subjects of mortality, death, fatality, and completeness were special for him.
For example, such phenomena are connected with the facts and details that little Boltanski hid from the Nazis in the secret room in his parent’s apartment in the 40s years. He ate and slept very poorly, did not have the opportunity to play and develop as well as any child deserves, and assumed a full-fledged upbringing. Therefore, every day was like the last because people could “fall asleep” forever by seeing the day off.
Subsequently, the Holocaust and genocide theme became the leading one in the artist’s significant projects, combining details of military life, architecture, and sound. The master also united epic dispassion with piercing emotionality, the rigor of the funeral ritual, and the conventionality of the theater. In addition, he appealed to nameless “little souls” who have dissolved in time but speak to the audience here and now.
The 50s of the last century – Christian’s initial attempts and trials of doing high art. At first, Boltanski created interesting plasticine sculptures and large-scale figurative paintings and then moved on to photographs. He collected his photos and built plotless, and to some extent, autobiographical stories out of them. Over time, Boltanski developed and improved himself and, at the same time, moved up the “career ladder.”
Hence, in 1968, his first exhibition was held in Paris, where he showed the personal audience photographs of the afterlife. In the 80s, he combined his works into a larger project while demonstrating the vast dimensions of the collection in terms of both the volume and the scale of the terrible events. Sometimes, the master could be impressed and inspired by very ordinary things, such as a pile of discarded underwear, which he used in the “No Man’s Land” installation. In recent years, Christian Boltanski has lived and worked in the city of Malakoff. The artist’s works are in the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Tate Gallery in London, and the Georges Pompidou Center in Paris.