Yves Klein
Yves Klein
Yves Kleinwas a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art. He is the leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany. Klein was a pioneer in the development of performance art, and is seen as an inspiration to, and as a forerunner of, Minimal art, as well as Pop art...
NationalityFrench
ProfessionPainter
Date of Birth28 April 1928
CountryFrance
base definitely distinct nuance personal possesses race
For me, each nuance of a color is in some way an individual, a being who is not only from the same race as the base color, but who definitely possesses a distinct character and personal soul.
real doors space
I had left the visible, physical blue at the door, outside, in the street. The real blue was inside, the blue of the profundity of space, the blue of my kingdom, of our kingdom!.. ..the immaterialisation of blue, the coloured space that can not be seen but which we impregnate ourselves with.
art eye order
I remain detached and distant, but it is under my eyes and my orders that the work of art must create itself. Then, when the creation starts, I stand there, present at the ceremony, immaculate, calm, relaxed... ready to welcome the work of art that is coming into existence in the tangible world.
mean reality blue
The immaterial blue colour shown at Iris Clert's in April had in short made me inhuman, had excluded me from the world of tangible reality; I was an extreme element of society who lived in space and who had no means of coming back to earth. Jean Tinguely saw me in space and signaled to me in speed to show me the last machine to take to return to the ephemerality of material life.
mother earth taste
I arrived on earth in 1928. Born into a milieu of painters, I acquired my taste for painting with my mother's milk.
childhood five-senses lost
I had proof that I had five senses, that I knew how to get myself to function! And then I lost my childhood...
france want next
I want to take as the canvas for my next picture the entire surface of France.
bars lines painting
I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figurative or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars.
color substance form
Color is sensitivity in material form, substance in its purest form.
flames fire burning
I made the flames lick the surface of the painting in such a way that is recorded the spontaneous traces of the fire. But what is it that provokes in me this pursuit of the impression of fire? Why must I search for its traces?
views trying different
I was trying to show colour, but I realized at the private view that the public were prisoners of a preconceived point of view and that, confronted with all these surfaces of different colours, they responded far more to the inter-relationship of the different propositions, they reconstituted the elements of a decorative polychromy.
preparation hours minutes
Hours of preparation for something that is excecuted, with extreme precision, in a few minutes. Just as with a judo throw.
artist creative serendipity
The essential of painting is that 'something', that 'ethereal glue,' that 'intermediary product' which the artist exudes with all his creative being and which he has the power to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial matter of the painting.
color matter form
Color is sensibility in material form, matter in its primordial state.