YVES KLEIN AND THE TANGIBLE WORLD
Lévy Gorvy Dayan opens Yves Klein and the Tangible World, an exhibition devoted to the engagement of the body in the visionary French artist’s oeuvre. Curated in collaboration with the Yves Klein Foundation, the presentation brings together nearly 30 examples of Yves Klein’s Anthropométries (1960–62) and Peintures de feu (Fire Paintings, 1960–62).
April 11 – May 25, 2024
Klein’s paintings affirm his conviction that art should exude life. His Anthropométries and Peintures de feu exemplify this ethos, possessing traces of living flesh and imprinted memories of fire, water, earth, and air. Klein once wrote, “The link between spirit and matter is energy. The combined mechanism of these three elements generates our tangible world, which is claimed to be real but is in fact ephemeral.”
For Klein, not only did the nude body provide articulate mark-making, but it also represented openness, liberation, and a celebration of being. Importantly, he did not view his works as figurative in a traditional sense, derived from the hand of the artist. As he wrote on the creation of the Anthropométries, “the work of art must complete itself before my eyes and under my command…. as soon as the work is realized, I stand there—present at the ceremony, spotless, calm, relaxed, worthy of it, and ready to receive it as it is born into the tangible world.”
Formed by fire, water, and flesh, Klein’s Peintures de feu embody creation born of destruction: “Fire, for me, is the future without forgetting the past. It is the memory of nature.” The series began following the artist’s 1961 retrospective at the Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld, Germany, that included outdoor fire sculptures, which he used to make the first group of fire paintings.
The exhibition will also include a sculptural floor installation of Pigment pur bleu (Pure Blue Pigment, conceived 1957). Composed by gravity, the sculpture comprises countless powdered grains of pure International Klein Blue. In this form, Klein exalted, the textured pigment possesses “a brilliance and an extraordinary, autonomous life of [its] own”—revealing “color in itself. The living and tangible matter of color.”
On the occasion of the exhibition, Lévy Gorvy Dayan will present a performance of Klein’s MonotoneSilence Symphony at St. James’ Church, New York, on Wednesday, May 1, at 6:30 pm. Conducted by Petr Kotik and performed by the orchestra and choir of the S.E.M. Ensemble, the symphony is composed of a single note held for twenty minutes followed by twenty minutes of silence.
Producing the sensation of endless duration, Klein describes the symphony as “[consisting] of one unique continuous ‘sound,’ drawn out and deprived of its beginning and of it end, creating a feeling of vertigo and of aspiration outside of time…. In the world of our possibilities of conscious perception, it is silence—audible perception.”