Born in 1955 in Reims, Champagne, France. Studied at the École des Beax Arts in Reims (1972–1977) and the École Nationale Supérieure des Beaux Arts in Paris (1977–1979). Initially a painter, he worked with chalk, oxides, ash on rough canvas tarpaulins mounted on rudimentary stretchers, transforming their window motif into a cross. This form then developed into a bas-relief and Lapie’s materials evolved: sheet metal, cement and charred wood for In Case of War (1992, Frac Champagne-Ardenne); cement, paint and concrete reinforcing bars for War Game, a public commission that was censored in 1995. From the patent brutality of this experience – and following a creative visit to the Amazon Forest – Lapie moved on directly to producing monumental sculptures, shaping figures in rough-hewn, fire-blackened timber. Some were created in the Champagne, a region that witnessed bloody fighting during World War I, and were erected in various locations around the world: Fort 61 in the Sculpture Park at Echigo Tsumari, Japan; the Salomon Foundation, Alex, France; the Musée des Beaux Arts de Reims, France; The Crow’s Nest, Southern Alberta, Canada; the stone figures of In Path of the Sun and the Moon at Jaipur, India; Le pupitre des Étoiles in cast-iron in the Parc de Sceaux near Paris; and a quantity of works in private collections in Europe and the United States. Christian Lapie’s oeuvre probes individual and collective memory. Specific history-charged sites inspire his installations of spectral figures. Wherever they stand, whatever the continent, the powerful and monumental figures without arms or facial features question and unsettle. As the critic Philippe Piguet underlines, “The duty to remember to which they allude is a civic, quite simply human, duty.”