France: contemporary artist Christian Boltanski is dead
The artist Christian Boltanski at the first digital festival of the Théâtre du Châtelet, “Après, demain”.
© Siegfried Forster / RFI
Text by: RFI Follow
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Christian Boltanski, 76, died in Paris after several days of hospitalization.
Photographer, sculptor, filmmaker, he has been made famous by his installations which combine memories, emotions and anxieties.
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For 50 years Christian Boltanski has multiplied exhibitions around the world, participated in multiple biennials, made
interventions
in places like Patagonia where he built large whistles by the sea in which the wind imitates the song of whales. .
His heart archives on Teshima Island in Japan recorded millions of human heartbeats.
Omnipresent on the international scene, very influential on the younger generation, he has made absence one of his recurring subjects.
Employing all kinds of material, Boltanski seeks above all to provoke emotion around the themes of memory, the unconscious, childhood and death.
The artist has worked extensively with photographic images taken in family albums, recovered by chance, found in newspaper pages, especially faces - as in
The children of Berlin
in 1972,
The reserve of the dead Suisses
in 1990 or
The ghosts of Warsaw
in 2001.
Captioned photos, enhanced with pastels, arranged by categories, projected on walls, curtains.
Many of his installations refer to the disaster, to the Shoah from which his father escaped hidden under a floor by his mother during the Second World War.
The greatest artistic capitals of the world have welcomed the monumental devices of Christian Boltanski who delves into the tragedy of life and painful memory.
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To read also: “After, tomorrow”, the artist Christian Boltanski and the digital world
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