Boltanski was born in Paris to a Jewish father of Ukrainian heritage and a Corsican mother. He lives and works in Malakoff and is married to the artist Annette Messager, with whom he sometimes collaborates.
His artistic work is haunted by the problems of death, memory and loss; he often seeks to memorialize the anonymous and those who have disappeared.
In his preliminary years, Boltanski's paintings were concerned primarily with themes of historical significance. However, by the 1970s, Boltanski removed himself from the painting arena and began his quest for remnants of his own past through selected artworks. These artworks led Boltanski to question the substance he had used when creating his own artworks. However, this introspectivism supplied him with the motive for other artworks in which non-truths and the realisation of fundamental truths converged. Boltanski reconstructed his own youth in this method. In doing so, Boltanski used a vast spectrum of media. For example, film, performance, photography and video. It is interesting to note that Boltanski maintained this vision and direction without focusing on the obvious contradiction of his self-understanding as a painter.
Moreover, the combination of varied media is a fundamental part of the spatial dimension which has been the focus of Boltanski's work since the mid-1980s.
Quotations
I began to work as an artist when I began to be an adult, when I understood that my childhood was finished, and was dead. I think we all have somebody who is dead inside of us. A dead child. I remember the Little Christian that is dead inside me.
—Christian Boltanski, Tate Magazine Issue 2
I stopped going to school at about age 12, and I was very crazy, and I stayed at home. One day I made a little object in plasticine and my parents said it was good. So I started to make more, and to make drawings, and I began to make large paintings in my bedroom.—Christian Boltanski, Tate Magazine Issue 2
We are all so complicated, and then we die. We are a subject one day, with our vanities, our loves, our worries, and then one day, abruptly, we become nothing but an object, an absolutely disgusting pile of shit. We pass very quickly from one stage to the next. It's very bizarre. It will happen to all of us, and fairly soon too. We become an object you can handle like a stone, but a stone that was someone.—Christian Boltanski
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