YVES KLEIN AND GÜNTHER UECKER

Lévy Gorvy Dayan is pleased to present the exhibition Material States by the artists Yves Klein and Günther Uecker. Titans of Europe’s postwar avant-garde, they developed radically alternative visual languages at a time when artistic traditions were increasingly questioned and dismantled.

June 21 - August 3, 2024

Both Klein and Uecker experienced the devastation of the Second World War at a young age. As emerging artists, they rallied against traditions they saw as lifeless and authoritarian, turning to unorthodox methods and media. Combining belief in scientific progress with deeply felt spiritual ideas and poetic transformations of unconventional materials, their practices sought to instigate transformative moments of pure perception

In the late 1950s, influenced by Eastern philosophies and Gregorian chanting, Uecker began a ritual of hammering nails onto canvas, panels, and objects, to achieve complex patterns of light and shadow without recourse to traditional methods associated with the history of painting.

Klein first exhibited his monochromes in 1955, and worked with pigment and synthetic resin to create surfaces that disbanded conventional ideas of painting and embodied concepts of the infinite and the immaterial. Inspired by sources from Zen Buddhism to the writing of Eugène Delacroix, Klein invested color with metaphysical symbolism, arriving at the three hues that would dominate his oeuvre from the late 1950s: blue, gold, and rose.

Le silence est d’or demonstrates Klein’s expert navigation between a principal material state and transcendent experience, alongside the ikb saturated fields of Monochrome bleu sans titre (ikb 231, 1959) and Relief Planétaire “Région de Grenoble” (rp 10, 1961/90).

In the early ’60s, Uecker joined Heinz Mack and Otto Piene in the movement Group Zero—a selfproclaimed “ground zero” for artists wanting to reformulate the conditions for art in a rapidly modernizing society—with which Klein was also increasingly associated. Works from this period include Hommage à Yves Klein II and Peinture de feu sans titre (f 78, 1961), which reveal how the artists positioned physical, performative processes at the core of their practices.

Through the exhibition’s illumination of important works from key moments in the artistic lives of Klein and Uecker, Material States considers the radical material and aesthetic effects that are channeled through their works—paying homage to the shared history, imagination, and ideas that continue to resonate to the present day.