“An artist has no life ; he is only the others' mirror”

Christian Boltanski is among those artists whose life and work foster each other. In his artworks both collective and personal memory meet and join in an incessant effort to face and surmount oblivion and death.

Born in Paris at the end of World War II, his work is deeply affected by the drama of the war and the Shoah. After a childhood of barely any schooling, rooted in the paradoxes of a familial milieu both Jewish and Christian, bourgeois and bohemian, he began teaching himself to paint from the age of fourteen, before learning about contemporary art on his own.

In 1968, at the age of 24, he had his first exhibition in Paris, where he presented sketches staged with life-sized marionettes, together with a film entitled La vie impossible de C. B., in which he shifted the autobiographical film genre. The work he developed throughout the 1970s continued in this fictional autobiographical vein. He drew up an inventory both real and imaginary of his own childhood, compiling photographs and souvenirs, objects supposedly lost and found again, in works nuanced with nostalgia but also light humour. Other kinds of inventories followed, which collected photo albums or objects from the daily lives of anonymous persons. In 1976, with Images Modèles, he introduced the concept of "average taste", characterized by a staging of the banal, a hypertrophy of daily life. His work until then had been woven through with elements from his own world or that of those near to him; henceforward it would make way for a crowd of anonymous persons. After Compositions Photographiques, in which he expanded amateur photography shots to painting-sized dimensions, he returned to the transitory and fragile compositions of his early work, in which he rendered an existential content that evoked, for the first time openly, the memory of the Shoah. Opening up to a multitude of existences saved one by one from oblivion, the Monuments series began in 1985: installations of photographic portraits presented in altar-like mural compositions, or constellations of images lit by small lamps.

“Art is an attempt to halt the passing of time”

Christian Boltanski's art rises like a rampart against oblivion and death. In the series succeeding each other (Reliquaires (“Reliquairies”), Réserves (“Reserves”), Véroniques (“Veronicas”), Vêtements (“Clothing”), etc.) he uses the most familiar traces of humanity - school or ID photos, biscuit tins, clothes, from 1968 - to favour the creation of emotion in his works, the tragic meaning of which is increased tenfold by his mastery of the installation. “Naming all Mankind” is the underlying plan in all of his work over the past decade which concentrates on the individual’s distinctiveness in the heart of the masses. Since 2008 Christian Boltanski plans to create the Archives du cœur of all humanity, sound archives to be preserved on Teshima Island, in the Inland Seto Sea.

“My works are sheets of music”

Artist of that which is lived emotion, determinedly holding himself back from movements and theories, his artworks, even when they achieve spectacular dimension, are a direct working of the real, through fiction.

Developing the first idea that any exhibition is in itself a work, that art must be total and immediately implicate the visitor, he moves the creative work to outside of the museums in which it is traditionally confined. Producing his installations in emblematic, often religious places, where the quality and volume of the space is each time a new staging and rediscovery, he profoundly changes the conception of what an art exhibition is. “An exhibition is not a place for entertainment, but a place where, if we can't pray, we should at least think.” Christian Boltanski’s deeply human art has since 1980 gained international renown and a public awareness well beyond the usual boundaries of the art scene, especially in Germany, the United States and Japan. Winner of several international awards (2009 De Gaulle-Adenauer Prize / 2006 Praemium Imperiale Prize, Japan / 1994 Kunstpreis Aachen 1994 / etc.), the artist, whose works are included in the world's greatest collections (New York's Museum of Modern Art, the Pompidou Centre's Musée National d’Art Moderne in Paris, without forgetting London's Tate Modern or Munich's Haus der Kunst), lives and works in Malakoff.