Christian Boltanski - Conceptual Art

 

 Christian Boltanski (1944 – 2021) was a French sculptor, photographer, painter, and film maker. He is best known for his photography installations and contemporary French conceptual style
Boltanski began creating mixed media/materials installations in 1986 with light as essential concept. Tin boxes, altar-like construction of framed and manipulated photographs (e.g. Chases School, 1986–1987), photographs of Jewish schoolchildren taken in Vienna in 1931, used as a forceful reminder of mass murder of Jews by the Nazis, all those elements and materials used in his work are used in order to represent deep contemplation regarding reconstruction of past. While creating Reserve (exhibition at Museum für Gegenwartskunst in Basel in 1989), Boltanski filled rooms and corridors with worn clothing items as a way of inciting profound sensation of human tragedy at concentration camps. As in his previous works, objects serve as relentless reminders of human experience and suffering. His piece, Monument (Odessa), uses six photographs of Jewish students in 1939 and lights to resemble Yahrzeit candles to honor and remember the dead. "My work is about the fact of dying, but it's not about the Holocaust itself." In 1971 Boltanski produced his installation, L' Album de la famille D. 1939-1964.
Additionally, his enormous installation titled "No Man's Land" (2010) at the Park Avenue Armory in New York City, is a great example of how his constructions and installations trace the lives of the lost and forgotten.Wikipedia

 

Eugène Dodeigne - Stone Figures

Eugène Dodeigne, ( 1923 -  2015, near Bondues, France), Belgian-born French sculptor best known for his monumental stone figures, usually placed outdoors.Dodeigne was trained by his father, a stone mason, and attended the École des Beaux-Arts in Tourcoing and the Académie des Beaux-Arts in Paris. From the emaciated angularity of his earliest carved wooden figures he moved steadily toward a use of eroded curves and complete abstraction. In 1949 he settled in Bondues in northern France, where he began to sculpt in the local Soignies blue limestone. His works range widely in scale. While the smaller of his Soignies forms are highly polished, the surfaces of the monumental outdoor pieces (e.g., “Sculpture,” 1958) are stressed and patterned, suggesting weathered traces of archaic decoration. (britannica.com)

Sculptures Germaine Richier

Germaine Richier (16 September 1902 – 21 July 1959) was a French sculptor.
Born in Grans, Richier began her studies at the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Montpellier, in the atelier of Louis-Jacques Guigues; in 1926 she went to work with Antoine Bourdelle, remaining in his studio until his death in 1929. There she became acquainted with Alberto Giacometti, although the two were never close. Richier for her part was more interested in a classical approach to sculpture, preferring to work from a live model and then reworking the final product. She also met César Baldaccini at this stage in her career. She married Otto Bänninger on 12 December 1929. In 1936, she won the Prix Blumenthal. During the war, she met Marino Marini, in exile in Switzerland.Richier's early work was fantastic, combining classical forms with human-animal hybrids and depicting creatures such as the spider and the hydra. Her style became less figurative after World War II; the bodily deformations which she favored as subjects were more accentuated in an attempt to convey a greater sense of anguish.

 The greatest controversy surrounding Richier's work came about with her creation of a statue of Christ for the church of Notre-Dame de Toute Grâce du Plateau d'Assy. Meant to depict the physical and spiritual torment of Christ, she explained that: the cross has been taken with the suffering into the flesh, and its outlines can just be made out coming from the undersides of the arms. There is no face because God is the spirit and faceless....The sculpture was ordered removed from sight by the bishop of Annecy.This event was the catalyst for a great argument about the nature and role of sacred art which took place throughout the 1950s, during which many artists found themselves opposed to the traditional role of religious and academic art. Some have also described the controversy as a debate over the nature of God in modern society.
Richier, for her part, gained some notoriety from the entire business, but seemed to retreat into obscurity again before her death in 1959.Wikipedia

Sulptures in metal Albert Féraud

Albert Féraud (26 November 1921 in Paris – 11 January 2008 in Bagneux) was a French sculptor, author of sans titre exposed at the Musée de la Sculpture en Plein Air in Paris and friend off French painter Annick Gendron.Wikipedia