Boltanski, Christian

*08.09.1944 in Paris

biography

Christian Boltanski was born on September 8th in Paris. As a self-taught artist, he dealt intensively with his own past and strove to reconstruct it. In 1967 he began to decorate glass display cases with objects such as sugar cubes, hand-shaped globes and toy weapons, thus sketching a fragmentary sketch of a typical middle-class childhood. He began to work with photography. In 1968 Boltanski made the film "La vie impossible de Christian Boltanski", which was shown at his first exhibition in the Le Ranelagh cinema in Paris. In 1972 Boltanski auctioned off personal items, made inventories of his life and that of fictional characters and offered them - unsuccessfully - to various museums as a bequest. In 1974 he set up display cases for the puppet of a clown with whom he appeared in performances, and created an anthropological museum for it. In the following years, photography became increasingly important in his work - both as a means of - apparent - documentation and - self-referentially - as a motif. In the 1980s, Boltanski cast the shadows of eerie paper figures on the walls of exhibition rooms. In 1988, a retrospective was devoted to Boltanski in six museums in the USA. In the 1990s, Boltanski, consistently developing the concept of reconstructing his own childhood, dealt with the topic of the past and transience on a more general level. His installations made of archive boxes and photos were accompanied by publications, such as the thick volume entitled "Human" published in 1994 on the occasion of an exhibition in the Ludwig Forum, Aachen, with uncommented photos on thin paper, some overexposed and greatly enlarged, some blurred and coarsely rasterized so that the features of the people depicted were barely discernible.