• Yves Klein

Book, 2017

Yves Klein

Collectif

Yves Klein is the first retrospective in Latin America on the pioneering artist of action art and the immaterial practices of contemporary art. The exhibition charts a course through more than 75 artworks and an extensive selection of documents—letters, drawings, photographs and films—taking in the great variety of facets the artist developed over his short but intense and prolific career (1954-1962).

The exhibition takes a chronological approach to examine three of the principal issues present in his work: monochromatism, the material nature of the flesh, and the immaterial character of art. The starting point is his double exhibition “Monochrome Propositions” held at the Colette Allendy and Iris Clert galleries in Paris (1957), which marked the beginning of his blue period. The exhibition reveals this monochromatic universe, based on the conception of a color (IKB, International Klein Blue) as a field of immaterial sensibility. These works show him taking a distance from the art of his day, which was contesting the virtues of abstraction and figuration. After experimenting with two-dimensional works, Klein began to work with objects and other elements, coating them in blue pigment to transform them into ultramarine sculptures. The development of his monochromatic works embodies a conception not just of color but of art, in which the paintings are only the “ashes” of the work, as the artist himself described it.
Editor Museo Universitario Arte Contemporaneo, MUAC
Lieu Mexico City, Mexico
ISBN 978-607-02-9550-8

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