Yves Klein (1928–1962) was born in Nice, France, to an artistic family. Although Klein grew up in a creative household, he received no formal artistic training. His major artistic breakthrough came in 1947 while lying on the beach with two friends; they divided the universe between themselves. He possessed the ethereal space surrounding the planet and decided that the blue sky would be his first artwork. In the mid-1950s he then began to exhibit his monochrome paintings in which a canvas was uniformly covered in a single colour. His short career was characterised by many radical gestures. Yves Klein´s “Leap Into the Void” presents the artist soaring upwards from the parapet of a building like a Left Bank Superman. In 1958, he attracted attention with an “Exhibition of emptiness”, an empty gallery space in Paris painted white, titled The Void. In his search for colours, he developed – together with chemists and the French pharmaceutical company, Rhône Poulenc – the patented colour ‘International Yves Klein Blue’ (IKB). Between his oeuvre, Yves Klein´s table, a caffee table filled with IKB pigments, is one of the most iconic contemporary artworks. Moreover, Yves Klein´s art influenced minimal, conceptual and performance art by taking the painting out of the frame and blurring the boundaries between painting and sculpture. Yves Klein´s Atropometries are impressions of naked female models smothered in paint, kind of “living brushes”. Using this strategy allowed him to depersonalise the art object. Klein was a pioneer in the development of Performance art, and he is seen as an inspiration to and as a forerunner of Minimal art, as well as Pop art.

Yves Klein

Yves Klein is famous for his explorations into pure color—blue in particular. Employing only his signature, patented pigment, International Klein Blue, the artist made iconic monochromes that aimed to bring art into the realm of pure, atmospheric feeling.

https://data.wengcontemporary.com/media/Yves_Klein__Monochrome_und_Feuer_Content_Sheet_UPDATED_2024.pdf

This tryptic was executed in 1961 for the exhibition "Monochrome und Feuer" at the Haus Lange Museum, Krefeld. It contains a blue and a pink silkscreen, as well as a cardboard box coated in gold foil with gold leaf by Yves Klein.

The three sheets were rendered in the signature colours of the artist: International Klein Blue, rose and gold (to which Klein added three appliques of gold leaf) and have become iconic examples of the artist's work.

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“ I did not like the nothing, and it is thus that I met the empty, the deep empty, the depth of the blue. „

—Yves Klein