Christian Boltanski

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 class we were looking at a particular piece by Christian boltanski known as theatre d'ombre which translates to theatre of shadows, created between 1985-1990. This piece is a haunting yet playful piece created with scraps of every day materials such as cardboard and wire to become a piece of contemporary art that portrays the memories and dreams as well as the nightmare of jewish children from the Holocaust.