calendario eventi  :: 

X

15/9/2004

Yves Klein

Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt

The Schirn Presents an Extensive Retrospective of the Diverse and Visionary Work of the French Artist Yves Klein

Yves Klein (1928–1962) is considered one of the most important and original artists of the twentieth century. His diverse oeuvre, all produced during a period of just seven years, anticipated many trends such as the happening and performance, Land Art and Body Art and elements of Conceptual Art, and it has had a lasting influence on art that continues today. His many-layered personality, which fluctuated between extreme concentration and a total lack of boundaries, is also reflected in his oeuvre, in which monochromy and figuration or spirituality and theatricality did not represent antithesis. Instead, they all served Klein's overriding goal: to comprehend life by means of art. This retrospective shows the major works of each phase: the first color monochrome paintings in orange, yellow, green, red, black or white; the famous blue monochromes and the sponge reliefs and sculptures; the much debated anthropometries, in which he employed female models as 'living brushes;' the 'monogolds;' and his final experiments with fire and elements of nature. More than one hundred works have been assembled from international museums like the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Stedelijk Museum Amsterdam, the Fondación del Museo Guggenheim Bilbao, the Menil Connection in Houston, Texas, and from numerous private collections.

Olivier Berggruen and Ingrid Pfeiffer, the curators of the exhibition: 'Klein's famous photograph Leap into the Void, which depicts him floating above a street, is a symbol of the desire to overcome gravity. It is a manifestation of Klein's will to transcend limits, which runs through his entire oeuvre. The exhibition seeks to reveal the uncommon variety and the visionary character of the artist who has entered the history books as 'Yves, Le Monochrome.' One aspect of the exhibition is Yves Klein's relationship to Germany, and to that end numerous eyewitnesses of his day were interviewed and new, unpublished material was obtained.'
Max Hollein, the director of the Schirn: 'Klein's oeuvre unites modernism and postmodernism and in doing so also draws the demarcation line between them: on the one hand, his statements and his claim to 'universality' point to the modernist avant-garde from Mondrian to Malevich; on the other, Klein negated and undermined the classical work of art, dissolved into an action, and styled himself as an artistic personality in a way that anticipated the strategies of Andy Warhol or Joseph Beuys. His staging of even the minutest details and the orchestration of their reception, along with his linking of art and science, make him one of the most relevant figures for current art.'

The exhibition was made possible by the generous support of Peugeot Deutschland GmbH. Special thanks are due to the personal commitment of Olivier Veyrier, the managing director of Peugeot Deutschland. We were also fortunate enough to win over as sponsors the Hessische Kulturstiftung, BASF, Air France, Novotel Frankfurt City West, Mercure Hotel Residenz Frankfurt, and Druckhaus Becker GmbH.

Despite having been born into an artistic home - he was born in 1928 in Canges-sur-Mer to Fred Klein, a figurative painter, and Marie Raymond, an abstract painter in the tradition of the École de Paris - Yves Klein began his career as a judoka. His intense engagement with the philosophy and practice of the Asian martial art of judo - his studies included fifteen months and the renowned Kodokan Institute in Tokyo - had a lasting influence on his conception of art. Kodokan judo is strongly influenced by Zen philosophy and stands for the union of mind and body, increased receptivity, a search for a state of void, and complete harmony with existence. In addition, from the time of his youth Klein also pursued an interest in the mystic Christian teachings of the Rosicrucians. A strong, lifelong affinity with ritual and the themes of immateriality and the void are thus not associated dogmatically with religious principles but do express his occupation with spiritual themes.

Klein's first official appearance on the scene as a visual artist was in 1955, when he submitted his monochrome 'Expression of the world of orange' to the Salon des Réalités Nouvelles. The painting was rejected by the Salon, with the justification that a single color was not sufficient to construct a painting. The work is exhibited in first room of the Schirn's retrospective, along with a series of early monochromes in yellow, white, black, red, pink, and green. From the outset Klein used a roller rather than a brush in order to eliminate any traces of the artist's hand in the application of the paint. Color becomes all the more significant. Klein's canvases do not want to be understood as planes but rather as pulsing fields of color that extend into space, unbound by the edges of the painting. For Klein, color was 'materialized sensibility.' It manifests his effort to extend a purely visual perception to a comprehensive concept of sensory perception. He challenged his audience to dive into the infinite space of color and to experience a general heightening of sensitivity to the immaterial.

Klein attributed a particular role to the color blue, which embodied for him the most abstract aspects of tangible and visible nature - like the sky and the sea. Klein sought long for a blue that would correspond to his ideas and for a binding method that would retain the pigment's original luminosity. I.K.B. (International Klein Blue), a penetrating ultramarine blue he developed with the help of a chemist friend and patented became his trademark from then on. Klein's monochrome paintings, sculptures, and actions, exhibited in solo shows from Milan to Paris, Düsseldorf, and London, suddenly made him an internationally known artist. In keeping with the actionist character, the openings, which Klein always turned into spectacular artistic events, would feature blue cocktails; in Paris, in an effort to extend the sensitivity for blue to the whole population, 1001 blue balloons were released into the sky. In his utopian projects the artist went a step further: his Blue Revolution proposed the whole of France as a painting surface.

In the present exhibition another room is dedicated to a group of monochromes of equal size from 1957 that are very similar, but - here too revealing a conceptual approach - Klein saw them as very different and sold them at different prices. A third area comprises the diverse and striking impressions of bodies, his 'anthropometries,' in which 'living brushes' left behind traces on canvasses according to the artist's instructions, as static and dynamic forms, in groups or alone, in blue, gold, and pink. The works shown in the next section of the exhibition are among his most famous: the blue and pink sponge reliefs and sculptures, which Klein produced following a first monumental blue sponge relief for the foyer of the theater in Gelsenkirchen. An interest in questions of architecture led to a number of visionary designs for 'aerial architecture,' made in collaboration with the German architect Werner Ruhnau. Just as radical as Klein's architectonic idea of replacing walls with streams of air was his room Le vide (The void), which he exhibited in his Paris gallery in 1958. Here Klein went a step beyond monochromy. In a gallery that had been completely emptied, the walls that the artist had painted white bring the viewer in direct contact with a sensitized and sensitizing space. Art no longer seems like an object here but is now perceived in the form of an artistic presence that is perceived in space. Le vide is represented in this exhibition by a film that shows Klein before the white walls.

Beginning in 1960 Klein devoted himself increasingly to fire as a medium to express elemental energy. The fire paintings shown in the fifth room were produced in spectacular actions and were often combined with color and body impressions. Cosmogonies and so-called Planetary Reliefs mirrored Klein's cosmological worldview and other experiments with natural elements such as rain, wind, and storms, whose traces he fixed on canvas or paper. A final zenith is reached in the seventh room, with its enormous gold monochromes (monogolds) and a 'chapel' of late, large-format monochromes in blue (I.K.B.'s). They number among the artist's last works. Klein died in 1962, at the age of thirty-four, from the effects of a third heart attack. His brief life is compressed into his art, which is marked by a desire to comprehend the immaterial or, as Klein himself put it: 'My paintings are the ashes of my art.'

An extensive catalog accompanies that assembles the results of current Klein scholarship. A very young audience is addressed in a children's book by Nina Hollein, published by Hatje Cantz, which tells the story of Yves the daydreamer, and in a student guide by Petra Skiba, published by the Schirn. CONNECTED, the Schirn's program for students, children, and families, is offering children's hours, family workshops, tours, and vacation programs in connection with this exhibition.

Press preview: Thursday, 16 September 2004, 11.00 a.m., Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt

With Olivier Berggruen and Ingrid Pfeiffer, curators of the exhibition, and Max Hollein, Director of the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt.

CATALOG: Yves Klein. Edited by Olivier Berggruen, Max Hollein, and Ingrid Pfeiffer. With a preface by Max Hollein and texts by Nuit Banai, Olivier Berggruen, Paolo Bianchi, Frédéric Migayrou, Elena Palumbo-Mosca, Hans Pässler, Ingrid Pfeiffer, Jean-Michel Ribettes, Nicole Root, and Günther Uecker. German and English editions, ca. 280 pages, ca. 130 color and 60 black-and-white illustrations, Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit, 29.80 euro.

EXHIBITION DATES: 17 September 2004 – 9 January 2005. OPENING HOURS: Tue., Fri.–Sun. 10 a.m. – 7 p.m., Wed. and Thur. 10 a.m. – 10 p.m.

phone: (+49-69) 29 98 82-0

ADMISSION: 8 euro, reduced. 5 euro; family ticket 16 euro.

CURATORS: Olivier Berggruen, New York, Ingrid Pfeiffer, Schirn.

SPONSORED BY: Peugeot Deutschland GmbH
ADDITIONAL SUPPORT: Hessische Kulturstiftung, BASF, Air France, Novotel Frankfurt City West, Mercure Hotel Residenz Frankfurt, Druckhaus Becker GmbH.
MEDIA PARTNERS: Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, Deutsche Vogue, Hessischer Rundfunk – Cultural Channel hr2.

OTHER VENUES: Guggenheim Museum Bilbao (31 January – 2 May 2005).

PRESS OFFICE: Dorothea Apovnik (head), Simone Krämer.

VENUE: SCHIRN KUNSTHALLE FRANKFURT, Römerberg, D-60311 Frankfurt

stampa

permanent link