Christian Boltanski – Centre Pompidou
With this major retrospective exhibition, the Centre Pompidou revisits the life and work of one of France’s leading contemporary artists, renowned for deliberately blurring the boundaries between his life and his art. At once a visual artist, photographer, sculptor, and filmmaker, Christian Boltanski embraced a wide range of artistic forms and materials, constantly exploring the threshold between absence and presence.
Boltanski began painting in 1958. From 1967 onward, he gradually moved away from painting to experiment with other forms of expression, such as writing letters and compiling dossiers that he sent to figures in the art world. To create these works, he combined photocopies with original documents and photographs taken from his family’s photo albums. In doing so, he incorporated elements from his personal life into his art, to the point where his own biography became one of its central themes. As he once remarked, “Great artists no longer have a life of their own; their only life is to tell what everyone believes to be their own story.”
The concept of “individual mythology,” which gave its name to a section of Documenta 5 in Kassel, where he exhibited in 1972, perfectly encapsulates his work. Through fiction, he recounts his own life in a way that allows everyone to recognize themselves in it.
Combining an art of memory with an ongoing reflection on the rituals of Western society, Boltanski developed a body of work that is both deeply moving and sharply incisive—conceived as a lucid state of vigilance toward our culture, its illusions, and its disenchantments.
Following a labyrinthine path, this retrospective—the first since the Centre Pompidou’s landmark exhibition dedicated to him in 1984—celebrates a major body of work that remains profoundly engaged with the history of the world in which we live.
DURATION : November 13, 2019 – March 16, 2020
LOCATION : Centre Pompidou
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Faculty: Fine Arts
