CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI : UN ARTISTE MINIMALISTE EXPRESSIONNISTE
CHRISTIAN BOLTANSKI: A MINIMALIST EXPRESSIONIST ARTIST

Summary/Abstract: Christian Boltanski is an internationally renowned French artist. His work lies somewhere between two antinomic artistic trends, minimalism and expressionism. On the one hand, minimalism tends to remove all forms of emotions and subjectivity, on the other hand, expressionism expresses a cry, a suffering that would express itself in Boltanski’s work. Christian Boltanski was born right after the end of the second world war. He did not directly experience one of the most shocking massacres of the twentieth century, but he grew up listening to the stories of his parent's friends who went into hiding, like his father, or managed to return from the camps. Christian Boltanski's childhood was deeply affected by the stories of those who had survived the Shoah, and the paintings he made at the beginning of his artistic activity represented massacres. Nevertheless, the expressionist dimension of Boltanski's work appeared the most when Boltanski started to explore cinematic art with small movies entitled “The Man who coughs” or “How can we cope with him?”. Then, at the end of the 60s, Boltanski moved away from expressionism and turned to an object with geometric shapes industrially manufactured. The biscuit box, the showcase or the drawer, is given a central place in his work. The artist approached this object with minimalist forms from the angle of a rectangular parallelepiped. However, the box also represents a funeral urn whose function is to preserve the traces of a human existence. Thus, the box full of emotions responds to the artist's desire to transmit emotions to the spectators, while allowing him to contain and erase as much as possible the expressionist aspect of his work. This way, Boltanski’s work appears to be the work of both a minimalist and expressionist artist.

• Details
• Contents