Christian Boltanski

Christian Boltanski ( born September 6, 1944 in Paris ) is a French artist who was best known for his installations. He lives and works in Malakoff near Paris and is the brother of the sociologist Luc Boltanski. Christian Boltanski is married to the artist Annette Messager.

Life and work

Christian Boltanski, born shortly after the end of the German occupation in liberated Paris, the son of Ukrainian Jewish father and a Corsican mother, is dominated by the memory of the Holocaust. He sits in his works, which are to be seen in the most important international art collections, intense with its own past and its reconstruction apart. In 1967 he began to equip cabinets with objects such as pieces of sugar, hand-shaped globes and toy weapons to sketch as a typical middle-class childhood fragmentary. After he had first issued in 1968, he auctioned personal items in 1972, created its inventories and the lives of fictitious persons and offered these various museums as discount. In 1974, he presented cases for the doll of a clown on, with whom he appeared in performances, and this created an anthropological museum.

Parallel to the exhibitions with personal items or memorabilia published Boltanski pseudo- documentary reconstructions of his life. These are small booklets (or contributions in art magazines ), such as from 1969 Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon existence de 1944 à 1950., Or 10 images from childhood by Christian Boltanski, played on 12 June 1971. the attempts of the reconstruction of his own biography go so far, that he takes the photo albums of friends and they declared as photos of his own family.

In the following years the photograph gained in his work increasingly important. In the 80 - years Boltanski threw the shadow of mysterious paper figures on the walls of exhibition spaces. 1988 was dedicated to him in the U.S., a retrospective in six museums.

He took part in Documenta 5 in Kassel in 1972 in the Department of Individual Mythologies, 6 (1977) and the Documenta 8 represented at the documenta in 1987 as an artist.

In the 1970s, Boltanski has worked repeatedly in the so-called inventories - installations, in which personal items were in the possession of unknown deceased persons arranged and exhibited. The photographs and objects he finds primarily on flea markets. In his monograph ( I 's different) characterizes author Armin Second, this procedure as " [ ... ] Classification of the banal and useless, the used car and the superfluous, the obsolete and sentimental, just like the museum presentation imposes We suppose that all this had for a foreign person meaning and in its entirety, certain their physical, psychological, cultural and social life, more so than we usually admit that. "

Given the question of the extent to which reflect the issued and decrepit personal belongings of a person 's identity or testify force Boltanski inventory installations the viewer to question their own existence, the individual character of the core and its (necessary / unnecessary ) attachment to material objects.

Since the 90 - years, Boltanski, the concept of reconstruction of their childhood has consistently evolving, more generally, with the theme of past and transience. For the construction of the Berlin Academy of Arts, he prepares a permanent room installation. He is one of the artists of the decentralized exhibition Einstein Spaces (2005 ), which is curated by the Potsdam Einstein Forum. For the largely underground created Centre for International Light Art Unna Boltanski has the " Dance of Death II" created in 2002, a shadow play installation with copper figures.

In the Ruhr Triennale 2005, Christian Boltanski initiated together with Andrea Breth and Jean Kalman, the project " s underground ". In the same year he finished 10th in the Kunstkompass ranking. In 1994 he was awarded the art prize Aachen, 2006 with the Praemium Imperiale ( "Nobel Prize of the Arts " ) in the category of sculpture.

2008 Boltanski begins with the Les archives du coeur project. Boltanski must tackle the issues that arise each - with the finite nature of being and the human efforts against oblivion / forgetfulness - becoming.

2011 has been designed with an installation by Christian Boltanski, the entire French Pavilion at the 54th International Art Biennale of Venice. Curated by Jean -Hubert Martin. The installation called chance is divided according to the space into four parts: space 1 The Wheel of Fortune; Room 2 and 4 Last News of Humans and Space 3 Be New. Outside to the French pavilion are the "Talking Chairs". Chance works like a big -armed bandit. When a button is pressed and match three identical pieces of the part Be New, one obtains a work of art Boltanski.

Quotes

Asked about the Les archives du coeur project explained Boltanski: The heartbeat symbolizes our restlessness, the fragility, he is simultaneously self-portrait mirror and our finitude. Christian Boltanski in conversation with H. P. Schwerfel

Exhibitions (selection)

Awards

Pictures of Christian Boltanski

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