French artist Christian Boltanski dies aged 76

Christian Boltanski, one of France’s top contemporary artists whose multimedia works probed the meaning of mortality and memory, dies aged 76.

Boltanski, whose death in Paris’s Cochin hospital was first reported by Le Monde newspaper, often mixed banal daily objects with photographs, videos and sculpture, while at other times creating monumental installations.

The son of a converted Jewish doctor of Ukrainian origin and a Catholic French mother, Boltanski was born on September 6, 1944, as Europe reeled from the Nazi Holocaust.

During the World War II German occupation of France, Boltanski’s polio-ridden mother hid his father under the floorboards of their apartment and pretended that the couple had divorced.

Boltanski’s childhood was haunted by stories of family friends who had survived the Holocaust, a theme which would later greatly influence his work.