Lot 514 D

Following Yves Klein's first exhibition in 1956 at Colette Allendy, one of the avant-garde galleries in Paris, six years remained for him to develop his idea of performing art in theory and in action. The tremendously beautiful but highly sensitive surface, with which the artist undermines not only Informal Modernism and propagates a new beginning, awakened amazement among contemporaries and the media alike. The pure colour would become his artistic manifestation, and monochrome painting, the carrier of the immaterial. In addition to his legendary “blue”, Yves Klein favoured gold leaf and rose pink, a warm dusky pink with which he coloured panels, sponge reliefs on panels, air sculptures, fire paintings and anthropometries derived from Happening performances, as well as sponge sculptures. The variously-sized sponges depict the diversity of natural growth and, when coloured, come across as exotic flowers or small (bonsai) trees when elevated on a stone foot or metal plate. These monochrome sponge sculptures, soaked primarily in blue, or occasionally pink, seem somewhat magical in their immense intensity: on the one hand, the sponges mime something superficially artificial, but at the same time simulate a primordial piece of cooled magma from the center of our star. “The sponges - a living, wild material - enabled me to create portraits of the readers of my monochrome, who, after travelling through the blue of my paintings, are as completely impregnated with sensitivity as the sponges”.