It is certainly the Monumenta exhibition, and its spectacular
People
installation
, installed at the Grand Palais in 2010, which will remain engraved in the collective memory.
But Christian Boltanski's production has been very prolific.
Alternately filmmaker, painter, sculptor and photographer, the artist has deeply marked the world of contemporary art.
He was also one of the rare contemporary artists to sell his works in auction houses, like Sophie Calle or Daniel Buren.
He was a modest man, he hid things as long as he could
This Wednesday, Bernard Bilstène, former director of the modern art museum at the Pompidou center, who had devoted an exhibition to him in early 2020, confirmed to AFP, the death of his friend at the age of 76.
“Yes he died this morning at Cochin Hospital (AP-HP), where he had been for a few days.
He was sick.
He was a modest man, he hid things as long as he could, ”he said.
"It's a very great loss," bemoaned Bernard Blistène.
Above all, he loved this transmission between people, through stories, through memories.
He will remain as one of the greatest storytellers of his time.
He was an incredible inventor ”.
The childhood of Christian Boltanski, born after the liberation, was marked by the illness of his mother, suffering from polio and the specter of the Holocaust to which his father, from a Jewish family in Eastern Europe , narrowly escapes.
For 50 years, his work will be marked by the themes of childhood, memory and absence.
First a painter, he produced large naive paintings at the start of his career, then moved on to the creation of installations.
Read alsoChristian Boltanski, a Frenchman who exports himself
Self-taught, he has never followed any academic training.
He develops a very particular universe by reconstructing moments of life through everyday objects such as books or clothes.
His visual and sound works appeal to the emotion of the spectators and are imbued with symbolism.
Today visible at the Marian Goodman gallery in Paris in the exhibition Après, an eloquent title for an artist who never ceased, in his words, to “fight against oblivion and disappearance”.
On social networks, tributes are multiplying to perpetuate the memory of the artist whose light and shadow play served as his visual signature, as here with the shadow theater.
A great artist has passed away today.
Christian Boltanski
Théâtre des ombres 1985-1990 pic.twitter.com/UoYpTz0q2v
- Sylvain (@sl_lamr) July 14, 2021
Iconoclastic projects like selling his life annuity to a collector in Tasmania
In 2020, the Center Pompidou devoted an exhibition to him, “Faire son temps”, conceived as a gigantic unique work.
With him, "an exhibition was like a real story, like a great movement", still remembers Bernard Blistène, who had worked with him for forty years.
The event opened with a visual shock: a video of a seated man who keeps vomiting.
Video which tells of the confinement experienced by his family during the war and the years that followed, imbued with the omnipresent story of the Shoah.
We will also remember other iconoclastic projects: the artist had compiled on a Japanese island the beats of 75,000 hearts, sold his life annuity to a collector in Tasmania and tried to speak with the whales of Patagonia.