Artist reference - Christian Boltanski

He has also been an influence on my work …. Often using portraits of anonymous people to evoke tragedy and loss but also bring into question the way we create narratives around photographs, particularly in the style of family portraits, which may or may not be true. Light is also a feature in his artworks.

Artist biography

French sculptor, photographer, painter and filmmaker. Self-taught, he began painting in 1958 but first came to public attention in the late 1960s with short avant-garde films and with the publication of notebooks in which he came to terms with his childhood. The combination in these works of real and fictional evidence of his and other people's existence remained central to his later art.

In the 1970s photography became Boltanski's favoured medium for exploring forms of remembering and consciousness, reconstructed in pictorial terms. In the early 1980s Boltanski ceased using objets trouvés as a point of departure. Instead he produced ‘theatrical compositions' by fashioning small marionette-like figures from cardboard, scraps of materials, thread and cork, painted in colour and transposed photographically into large picture formats. These led to kinetic installations in which a strong light focused on figurative shapes helped create a mysterious environment of silhouettes in movement.

In 1986 Boltanski began making installations from a variety of materials and media, with light effects as integral components. Such works, for which he used portrait photographs of Jewish schoolchildren taken in Vienna in 1931, serve as a forceful reminder of the mass murder of Jews by the Nazis. In the works that followed Boltanski filled whole rooms and corridors with items of worn clothing as a way of prompting an involuntary association with the clothing depots at concentration camps. As in his previous work, objects thus serve as mute testimony to human experience and suffering.

Bibliography

Christian Boltanski: Reconstitution (exh. cat., ed. A. Franzke and M. Schwarz; Karlsruhe, Bad. Kstver., 1978)

Boltanski (exh. cat., ed. B. Blistène; Paris, Pompidou, 1984)

Christian Boltanski: Lessons of Darkness (exh. cat., ed. L. Gumpert and M. J. Jacob; Chicago, IL, Mus. Contemp. A., 1988)

Christian Boltanski: Reconstitution (exh. cat., essay L. Gumpert; London, Whitechapel A.G.; Eindhoven, Stedel. Van Abbemus.; Grenoble, Mus. Grenoble; 1990) [includes box with reprints of earlier publications]

Image – The Reserve of Dead Swiss 1990

The photographs of anonymous dead people were selected by Boltanski from obituary notices in Swiss newspapers. The lengths of fabric gathered around the shelves are shroud-like and also evoke the curtain of the crematorium. Aside from this suggestion of 'memento mori' the harsh beams that spotlight each face evoke references to interrogation and torture. These aspects together with the sheer scale of death suggested by the title and by the repetitive presentation employed here have led commentators to find references to the holocaust. However by nominating the victims as Swiss, a neutral people, the association is muted and allows for more intimate, personal and wider, historical reflections.

Franke, A , n.d Sourced from the Tate website http://www.tate.org.uk/art/artists/christian-boltanski-2305

 Viewed 20 October 2014 .