Yves Klein

As a complement to ‘Monet, Renoir, and Chagall: Journeys Around the Mediterranean’, an immersive exhibition produced by CULTURESPACES DIGITAL® echoes this tribute to the Mediterranean. ‘Yves Klein: Infinite Blue’ focuses on this major twentieth-century artist, who set out to turn his life into a work of art.

This ten-minute-long work immerses visitors in the plurality of the artist’s works, going beyond the famous International Klein Blue (IKB), a combination of ultramarine pigment and special binder. Amongst other works, visitors will discover the body prints with his Anthropometries, and nature with his Cosmogonies and his Planetary Reliefs. A native of Nice, Yves Klein loved the Mediterranean sky and was inspired by it to create his first work.

He believed that ‘painting is COLOUR’ and he sought to individualise, free, and magnify colour in its purest form. With Yves Klein, colour took on a spiritual and metaphysical dimension. In a 1950s Parisian setting visitors are invited into a contemporary art salon in order to view an immersive exhibition of Yves Klein’s works, which begins with a D Major chord from the ‘Monotone-Silence’ Symphony.

Retracing the artist’s career and his immaterial quest, the immersive exhibition presents the artist’s first works, the Monochromes, which were created in order to express the living world of each colour, but which were perceived by the general public as a polychromatic ensemble. Replacing the diversity of colours, a storm of ultramarine pigment fills the exhibition space and takes the viewers into another world, radiating with colour.

It is a vibrant blue called IKB (International Klein Blue), which became the artist’s signature colour.

Visitors are then immersed in dreamlike landscapes, where gold leaves dance and shimmer, revealing the spectacular reflections of the Monogolds and Monopinks.

They are then taken into the artist’s studio, where his assistants, whom he called his ‘living brushes’, move around on the canvas, leaving imprints on it with their bodies. When the studio finally begins to burn, unique forms literally spring forth on the walls. With Yves Klein, the destructive power of fire is transformed into a veritable creative power.

Shortly before dying, Yves Klein said to a friend: ‘I’m going to the biggest studio in the world and I’m only going to produce immaterial works there.’ As a tribute to his fina confession, the immersive exhibition’s finale takes visitors into an almost immaterial and infinite atmosphere.

Thanks to a selection of 90 works and 60 archive images, ‘Yves Klein: Infinite Blue’ completely immerses visitors in the subject matter and his artistic sensibility, accompanied by Vivaldi’s stirring and vibrant music and Thylacine’s electronic rhythms.

Listen to the playlist of the exhibition