Christian Boltanski: Éphémères, Marian Goodman

Marian Goodman Gallery, Soho, is staging a rare solo exhibition of work by French conceptual artist Christian Boltanski – a master of large-scale, immersive projects that tell powerful stories through cutting edge photography and design. Ephémères – Boltanski's first exhibition in London since 2010 – foregrounds several new film pieces, video triptychs, and physical sculpture alongside reworked pieces from the beginning of his career.

Boltanski's mixed-media work address themes such as memory, life, death and the soul. Often focusing on the Holocaust, Boltanski sees object as a relentless reminder of human experience and suffering. On the ground floor of the exhibition, in a suspended veiled passage, Boltanski revisits images first used for his seminal 1971 piece, Album de photos de la Famille D. In the new work, entitled La traversée de la vie, 2015, the original photographic images have been enlarged and printed onto thin veils. Illuminated by hanging light bulbs, the delicate, faded images of a bygone era unearth nameless faces, ghosts of forgotten and untraceable identities.

Misterios (Mysteries), 2017, 3 screen video installation

Boltanski's installations, often blurring the boundaries between fiction and reality, are created with reproduction in mind. Influenced by German conceptualist Joseph Beuys, Boltanski's work engages with 'shared preoccupations while being rooted in the artist's own history'. In an interview for Art In America he declared: 'Sixty or seventy percent of my work is more or less destroyed after a show. What is important for me is that it can be done again if someone knows how. It’s a little like music: when a composer creates a composition, this composition can be played by other people… Most art is only a relic. I wish mine to be more like a story, or knowledge. It’s not about the object, it’s the story.'

With more than 11,000 square feet of gallery space divided over two light-filled floors, the large scale and immersive nature of Boltanksi's art sings harmoniously with the unobtrusive and vast architecture of Goodman's Victorian town house.

In this explosive exhibition about memory, life, death, and the soul, we see human identity, human suffering and the ephemeral nature of life brought into sharp focus.