Christian Boltanski
The work of the French artist Christian Boltanski centres on the theme of memory. Born in 1944 in German-occupied Paris to a Jewish-Ukrainian father and a Catholic Corsican mother, the memory of the Holocaust has been a defining influence on Boltanski’s life. His own childhood and past, transience, and the human attempt to resist forgetting and being forgotten are among his work’s recurring motifs. Throughout his career, Boltanski has explored the memories embodied by people and things. An originator of the conceptual art movement known as “Spurensicherung” (“Conserving Traces”),