YVES KLEIN

Cofounder of the “Nouveaux Réalistes”, Yves Klein (1928-1962) strived to create dematerialized art with his monochrome pictures in his favored colors blue, gold and red. With his concentration on one color and the development of his unique shade of ultramarine, consisting of pure pigment and binder, he sought to depict the imagination of eternity. Luminous, profound and decorative at the same time, this pure color became a synonym for the freedom of the viewer and the endless possibilities of the imagination. Yves Klein was not only the inventor of the patented IKB (International Klein Blue) and an advocate for monochrome painting all the way to the colorless void, but also a pioneer in experimental painting techniques. He used “living paintbrushes” by having naked women covered with IKB, leave prints of their bodies on huge sheets of paper or created organic-seeming sculptures made of sponges, thus transcending the boundaries between painting and sculpture all the way to performance art, transforming color in new forms of perception.

Yves Klein was born in Nice in 1928 and died in Paris in 1962.