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Christian Boltanski

Born – Paris, France 1944

 

The resonant, emotional power of Christian Boltanski’s work is largely based on the association that the viewer brings to his instillations. Our propensity to keep traces – clothes, documents and memorabilia – of the people who have affected our lives, long after their death, forms the investigative basis of Boltanski’s work. The poverty of Boltanski’s materials is linked to Arte Povera: notions of survival and social experience that stem from concepts explored by Joseph Beuys. Autobiographical connotations, indictive of the artist’s Jewish-Catholic upbringing, often emerge. Reserve of the Dead Swiss typically uses numerous photographic portraits of people whom the spectator knows to be dead. Mounted on stacks of rusted tin containers, the wall they create appears like a mass memorial at a crematorium. The nature of the images, often taken from the Second World War period, instils a fear that here are archival pictures from the Holocaust. This fantasy is heightened by the sense of interrogation implied by the intensity of the lights directed from above. These obscure, rather than clarify, individual faces. What we cannot know about the lives of those displayed we fabricate in our imagination, as if the whole history of each were contained in the boxes as witness.

 

Masterpieces:

• Invitation to Image Model (Model Image)
• Hotel Chase (Altar to the Chase High School)

Text: The A-Z of Art, Nicola Hodge and Libby Anson.

 

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