THE SKY AS A STUDIO. YVES KLEIN AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES Exhibition From July 18 to February 1, 2021
PRESS RELEASE
Friday, 12 June 2020
PRESS CONTACTS Centre Pompidou-Metz Marion Gales Press relations téléphone : 00 33 (0)3 87 15 52 76 mél :marion.gales@centrepompidoumetz.fr Claudine Colin Communication Francesca Sabatini téléphone : 00 33 (0)1 42 72 60 01 mél :francesca@claudinecolin.com
Copyrights : Charles Paul Wilp, Yves Klein sur une échelle devant son relief-éponge au Neues Stadttheater de Gelsenkirchen Allemagne, Berlin, BPK © VG Bild-Kunst © ADAGP, Paris 2019 Photo © BPK, Berlin, Dist. RMN-Grand Palais / image BPK
From 18 July 2020, the Centre Pompidou-Metz will present an exhibition devoted to Yves Klein (1928-1962), a major figure on the post-war French and European art scene. «The sky is a workshop/studio?”» reveals the aesthetic affinities he developed, outside the New Realists’ movement, with a constellation of artists, from the Gutai group in Japan to the spatial artists in Italy, from the ZERO artist group in Germany to the Nul group in the Netherlands. As a «space painter», Yves Klein projected art into a new odyssey with them. The sky, the air, the void and the cosmos became the immaterial workshop for reinventing art and man’s relationship with the world after the tabula rasa brought about by the war. As early as 1946, Yves Klein associated his name to the other side of the sky, appropriating this infinite space as one of his canvases, while the spatial artists close to Lucio Fontana tried out making «artificial forms appear in the sky, spectacular rainbows». Piero Manzoni became committed to the search for a limitless space in which «matter becomes pure energy», which responds to Klein’s search for immaterial pictorial sensibility and to Otto Piene’s search for art as a sensory and regenerative medium for reconnecting man to the universe. The new visual arts strategies developed aim to go beyond the materiality of the work of art, seen as an obstacle to freedom, and venture into the experience of monochromy, emptiness and light, in gestures where the work is, like Lucio Fontana’s lacerated or perforated canvases, open to infinity. This cosmogonic aspiration is shared by these artists who, in the tradition of Klein, combine water and fire, earth and air. The light works by Günther Uecker, Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, which evoke galaxies in formation, reveal their fears in the face of the threat of nuclear war. The body becomes the seismograph of this acute awareness that man must
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