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Exhibition

 YVES KLEIN
 YVES KLEIN
Yves Klein

FC 11, 1961
OIL ON BURNT PAPER, MOUNTED ON CANVAS
ahlers collection
© Yves Klein Estate, ADAGP, Paris / VG Bild-Kunst, Bonn 2017
28. February 2006 - 01. July 2006

YVES KLEIN

LEAP INTO THE VOID

Yves Klein (1928–1962) shines like a beacon on the map of twentieth -century art: a brief but intense flash of light. Yet after his premature death, nothing would ever be the same again. He numbers among the truly significant figures of modern art. As early as 1947, at the age of only nineteen, he was signing his name in the sky over Nice, his home town. This symbolic gesture was an act of appropriation which left behind all the developments which had taken place in art since Duchamp. In signing the sky, Klein invited us on a journey of the imagination and played a very significant part in paving the way for the concept artists of the 1960s and 70s. At the same time, he expanded the boundaries of his studio, which he then saw as continuous with the outside world. He let nature – rain, sun and snow – play a role in shaping the appearance of his works. He sold vouchers which assured their purchasers of their right to participate in ‘zones of immaterial painterly sensibility’ – an act which strikingly links together his self-conception as a genius, traditions of alchemical conceptions of art and the transactions of modern consumer culture. 

Yves Klein embarked upon his famous ‘Leap into the Void’ on 27 November 1960. He embraces the cosmos as a Gallic Icarus and foregrounds the marriage between art and life in an emblematic and unique manner. Through his documentation of the action in Dimanche, a newspaper edited by him and published on that day only, he also became a founding father of later mail and press art initiatives. Klein’s legendary jump is by far the most spectacular example of a series of similar, equally extravagant and ingenious actions. He ‘painted’ pictures with flame throwers, usedmodels as live paintbrushes, and even on one occasion conducted an orchestra playing a score composed by him. Klein thus became a source of inspiration on many levels: for body art, which would later develop; for the era of happenings and performances; as well as for today’s cross-disciplinary art. But it was his monochrome works which played the biggest part in inscribing him in the collective artistic memory of the modern period, including International Klein Blue (IKB), which he patented. Their occupation of a space between picture and sculpture anticipates the qualities of the ‘specific objects’ created by American minimal artists.

In the exhibition Yves Klein – Leap into the Void: First Stages of Nouveau Réalisme, mounted by the Ahlers Pro Arte Foundation in the former home of the Kestnergesellschaft in Hanover, one such monochrome work in blue occupies a prominent position. A room within a room has been created in the exhibition’s main space, an artistic sanctuary reserved exclusively for Klein’s works. At the entrance hangs IKB 191, which has its own particular story to tell. Yves Klein dedicated the work in the year of his death to his ally and tireless defender of his art, the renowned critic and publicist Pierre Restany. On the reverse side of the canvas you can read ‘To Pierre Restany, who is at the heart of the monochrome proposal’, signed ‘Yves the Monochrome, 1962’. By christening himself thus, Klein demonstrated an early feeling for the power of the label, of corporate identity – another future-oriented element of his oeuvre. The term ‘the monochrome proposal’ originates from an early text written by Restany about Klein. Restany, like Klein, avoided using the term ‘painting’, choosing instead to shift focus onto the reflexive substance of the works. 

Klein, who brought art to fighting in his judo practice, battled like a champion in the world of art. In his role as theoretical thinker, Restany was a constantly loyal companion to Klein in this battle. It was he who coined the term ‘new realists’, a banner under which Klein and his friends joined together as an artist group. Most of the artists presented in the exhibition number among the founding members of this group, with Arman, a close friend from Nice, leading the way. It was Arman who responded to Klein’s legendary exhibition The Void (1958) with the exhibition Fullness at the Iris Clert Gallery. Whereas Klein had completely cleared out the Parisian gallery and had covered it in an immaterial, meditative white, Arman filled it up to the ceiling with the bric-à-brac of everyday life and thus transformed it into an alarming, consumerist portent. He employed similar materials to create a portrait – which can also be seen in the Hanover exhibition – of the Düsseldorf gallery owner Alfred Schmela, who dedicated his first exhibition in Germany to Yves Klein. Visitors to the exhibition will also experience important works by the affichistes Dufrêne, Villeglé, Hains and Rotella, as well as pieces by César, Spoerri, Deschamps and Raysse. 

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