Christian Boltanski - Life and Work

Life and Work

Born in Paris, of Catholic and Jewish heritage.

Having no formal art education, he began painting in 1958. Nevertheless, he first came to public attention in 1960 with few short films and publication of several notebooks. Both avant-garde short films and notebooks contained mutualism of both real and fictional human existence. This relation remained dominant concept to his later art. In 1970, he began experimenting with object creation from clay and from many other unusual materials (sugar and gauze). These works, some of them entitled Attempt at Reconstitution of Objects that Belonged to Christian Boltanski between 1948 and 1954 (1970–1971), consisted of flashbacks of segment of life and time, diminishing memory and human condition.

In the 1970s, Boltanski started using mainly photography for expressing form, exploration of consciousness, and remembering. After 1976, he started treating photography as painting, making collages of sliced photographs of still nature and everyday life banality in order to reflect collective aesthetic condition of modern civilization in ordinary, stereotypical way. As a departure from his earlier medias, he started using readymade objects. His use of small, colorful figures made from cardboard, thread and cork, transposed photographically into large picture formats, helped him creating effective theatrical compositions. These works encouraged him to start creating kinetic installations. The Shadows (1984) consists of strong light focused on figurative shapes and forms generating mysterious environment of silhouettes in movement.