With this great retrospective exhibition, the Center Pompidou returns to the life and work of one of France's leading contemporary artists, famous for having blurred the boundaries between his life and his work. At the same time visual artist, photographer, sculptor and filmmaker, Christian Boltanski appropriates a multitude of artistic expressions and materials and continues to explore the edge between the absent and the present.

Boltanski began painting in 1958. From 1967 he moved away from painting to experiment with other forms of expression, such as writing letters or files that he sent to personalities in the art world. To build them, he uses photocopies that he mixes with original documents or photographs taken from albums of his family. He integrates into his work elements from his personal universe, to the point that his biography becomes one of his main themes.According to him "Good artists have no life, their only life is to tell what seems to each his own story."

The expression "individual mythology", which entitled a section of Kassel's Documenta 5 to which he participated in 1972, perfectly characterizes his work: he narrates his life in the form of a fiction in which everyone recognizes himself. Combining an art of memory with a continuous reflection on the rites of our Western society, Boltanski has developed a sensitive and corrosive work, conceived as a state of lucid vigilance over our culture, its illusions and disenchantments.

Following a labyrinthine itinerary, this retrospective, after the first that the Pompidou Center dedicated to it in 1984, celebrates an essential work in full control of the history of the world in which we live.