Christian Boltanski

Christian Boltanski could be considered a shadow artist. Quite literally, as many of his installations are swathed in the kind of darkness not usually found in a museum gallery. Flickering candlelight reveals flimsy dolls cut from sheet metal, casting their restless shadows on the walls (see Les Bougies). Or faded photographs, portraits framed in black, lit only by small work lamps (see Diese Kinder suchen ihre Eltern). Colour is virtually absent. Black-and-white photos, worn clothing and rusted biscuit tins evoke a gloomy mood.

Boltanski’s work revolves around shadow in a figurative sense as well. His art usually deals with death, and therefore with memory and remembrance as well (see Les Concessions). Boltanski reflected on the many guises human mortality can take, from a violent end to an ‘ordinary’ death. But he also dealt with childhood: a stage that has an end of its own, after which no adult can ever return. For Boltanski, photography itself was tied to death, as it captures a moment that is gone forever.

Boltanski created his first ‘notebooks’ in the late 1960s. These collections of personal objects and photos were intended to make up for a lack of mementos from his own childhood (see L'album photographique de Christian Boltanski). From that period on, he collected objects that bore witness to past lives, especially old portrait photos found at flea markets and in archives. These pictures show people who have become anonymous and of whom nothing remains except their images – images he began incorporating into monumental installations from the late 1980s on.

‘I was born in Paris in 1944; from my earliest days, I heard about people who returned and people who didn’t, about the Shoah. I turn that trauma into art,’ Boltanski said. Still, he repeatedly emphasised that rather than focusing solely on the Holocaust, his work was about the universal mechanisms of memory.