Christian Boltanski

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Christian Boltanski, 1990
Christian Boltanski, 2016

Christian Boltanski (born September 6, 1944 in Paris ; † July 14, 2021 there ) was a French artist who was best known for his installations.

In his work it was always about the falsification of memories and the fragility of our life plans; Time, transience and death were his big themes. As an artist, Boltanski worked with media as diverse as photography and sound installation (the only thing he never did: paint), but he was most famous for his installations .

He lived and worked in Malakoff near Paris and was the younger brother of the sociologist Luc Boltanski . Christian Boltanski was married to the artist Annette Messager .

life and work

Sound installation The Whispers by Christian Boltanski at the Folkestone Triennale, 2008
Vanitas , crypt Salzburg Cathedral
Chance 9 , Carriageworks, Sydney
Wall art The residents of the Hotel de Saint-Aignan in 1939 , Musée d'art et d'histoire du Judaïsme, Paris

Christian Boltanski was born shortly after the end of the German occupation in liberated Paris as the son of the Jewish Ukrainian chief physician Étienne Boltanski (1896–1983) and Marie-Élise Ilari-Guérin. His mother was from Corsica and a left-wing Catholic.

Boltanski was shaped by the memory of the Holocaust and in his works, which can be seen in the most important international art collections, intensively dealt with his own past and its reconstruction. In 1967 he began to equip showcases with objects such as pieces of sugar, hand-shaped globes and toy weapons in order to sketch fragmentarily a typical middle-class childhood. After exhibiting for the first time in 1968, he auctioned personal items in 1972, made inventories of his life and that of fictional people, and offered these various museums as bequests. In 1974 he put on showcases for the doll of a clown, with whom he appeared in performances, and created an anthropological museum for him.

Parallel to the exhibitions with personal items or memorabilia, Boltanski published pseudo-documentary reconstructions of his life. These are small notebooks (or articles in art magazines), such as from 1969 Recherche et présentation de tout ce qui reste de mon existence de 1944 à 1950 or 10 pictures from Christian Boltanski's childhood, played on June 12, 1971 . The forms of reconstruction of his own biography went so far that he took over the photo albums of friends and declared them as photos of his own family.

In the following years photography became increasingly important in his work. In the 1980s, Boltanski cast the shadows of mysterious paper figures on the walls of exhibition spaces. In 1988 a retrospective in six museums in the USA was dedicated to him.

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

In the 1970s, Boltanski worked repeatedly on the so-called inventories - installations in which personal items belonging to unknown, deceased people were arranged and exhibited. Most of the photographs and objects he found at flea markets. In his monograph ( I is something different ), the author Armin Second characterized this procedure as “[…] classification of the banal and useless, the used and superfluous, the obsolete and sentimental, which, like the museum presentation, forces us to assume that everything this had meaning for a stranger and in its entirety determined their physical, psychological, cultural and social life, more than we normally admit. "

In view of the question of the extent to which a person's exhibited and decayed personal objects reflect or testify to his identity, Boltanski's inventory installations force the viewer to question his or her own existence, the individual character core and its (necessary / unnecessary) attachment to material objects.

Archive of the German MPs in the Reichstag building

From the 1990s onwards, Boltanski, consistently developing the concept of reconstructing one's own childhood, dealt with the subject of the past and transience on a more general level. He prepared a permanent room installation for the new building of the Berlin Academy of the Arts . In 1999 he contributed the installation Archive of German Members of Parliament for the Reichstag building . He was one of the artists in the decentralized exhibition Einstein Spaces (2005), which was curated by the Einstein Forum in Potsdam . For the largely underground Center for International Light Art Unna, Boltanski created the Dance of Death II in 2002 , a shadow play installation with copper figures.

At the RuhrTriennale 2005, Christian Boltanski led the Nights Underground project together with Andrea Breth and Jean Kalman . In the same year it was ranked 10th in the art compass ranking. In 1994 he was awarded the Aachen Art Prize , and in 2006 the Praemium Imperiale (“Nobel Prize for the Arts”) in the Sculpture category.

In 2008, Boltanski started the Les archives du coeur project . Boltanski dealt with questions that everyone poses - with the finiteness of being and with human efforts against forgetting / being forgotten.

Room installation Chance

In 2011, the entire French pavilion at the 54th Venice International Art Biennale was designed with a room installation by Christian Boltanski. The curator was Jean-Hubert Martin. The installation called Chance was divided into four parts according to the space: Room 1 The Wheel of Fortune ; Room 2 and 4 Last News of Humans and Room 3 Be New . The talking chairs stood outside the French pavilion . Chance worked like a big one -armed bandit . When a button was pressed and three identical parts of the Be New part matched, a work of art by Boltanski was obtained.

On November 1, 2018, two permanent installations by Christian Boltanski were opened in the Völklinger Hütte : The forced laborers as a place of remembrance for the more than 12,000 forced laborers during the Nazi era and memories of the ironworkers.

Boltanski died in Paris in July 2021 at the age of 76.

Quotes

When asked about the Les archives du coeur project , Boltanski explained: " The heartbeat symbolizes our restlessness, the fragility, it is at the same time a self-portrait and a mirror of our finitude ."

Exhibitions (selection)

Awards

literature

Web links

Commons : Christian Boltanski  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ The administrator is dead , Süddeutsche, July 14, 2021
  2. ^ L'artiste plasticien Christian Boltanski est mort , Le Monde, July 14, 2021
  3. ↑ a b Alex Rühle : In a large text box . In: sueddeutsche.de . July 30, 2017, ISSN  0174-4917 ( sueddeutsche.de [accessed July 31, 2017]).
  4. ^ A b Johanna Adorján : Christian Boltanski Paris exhibition Lockdown. Retrieved February 2, 2021 .
  5. ^ Munzinger-Archiv GmbH, Ravensburg: Christian Boltanski - Munzinger Biographie. Retrieved July 31, 2017 .
  6. ↑ Ed. Givaudan, Paris, May 1969, 9 pages. Quoted from AQ 13: Photos, Dudweiler 1973, o. P.
  7. ^ AQ 13: Photos, Dudweiler 1973, o. P.
  8. ↑ Armin Second: I am something else. Art at the end of the 20th century. DuMont Verlag, Cologne 2000, ISBN 3-7701-5041-4 , p. 36.
  9. ^ Andreas Kaernbach: Archive of German Members of Parliament, 1999, metal boxes with stickers, carbon filament lamps. In: bundestag.de. German Bundestag , accessed on September 30, 2019 .
  10. ↑ Christian Boltanski: Totentanz II, 2002, From the Théâtre d'Ombres series ( Memento of October 27, 2012 in the Internet Archive )
  11. ^ Domus : Christian Boltanski Jean Kalman. Fattore K , Interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist with Christian Boltanski and Jean Kalman about Krawczyk, Cantor and their visions, edited by Loredana Mascheroni, December 21, 2005
  12. ^ Christian Boltanski: Chance. Biennale di Venezia 2011. Accompanying journal (PDF) ( Memento from March 17, 2013 in the Internet Archive )
  13. ↑ Quote, accessed August 28, 2012
  14. ^ Christian Boltanski - Faire son temps. Retrieved May 16, 2021 (Fri-FR).
personal data
SURNAME Boltanski, Christian
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French artist
DATE OF BIRTH September 6, 1944
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH July 14, 2021
PLACE OF DEATH Paris