YVES KLEIN: BY THE BOOK

YVES KLEIN: BY THE BOOK opens today at the Gagosian Shop in Paris. The exhibition runs until the 22nd of December.
"Gagosian Shop, Paris, is pleased to present Yves Klein: By the Book, a tribute to the artist in what would have been his ninetieth year.

A major figure of the French avant-garde movement Nouveau Réalisme, Yves Klein (1928–1962) continually sought to create more direct ways of experiencing reality. His paintings, sculptures, photographs, books, and performances often blurred the boundaries between observation and sensation—from his studies of speed to his use of “International Klein Blue” (IKB), the eponymous pigment that he developed with a chemist. Klein experimented with IKB throughout his oeuvre as a way to communicate his utopian vision of the world. As he stated in a 1959 lecture at the Sorbonne, “Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colors are not. . . . All colors bring forth specific associative ideas, tangible or psychological, while blue suggests, at most, the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual nature what is most abstract.” This line of inquiry led to Klein’s “The Monochrome Adventure: The Monochrome Epic” (1960), in which he wrote that he saw vast expanses of color as “a window opened onto the freedom to become impregnated with the immeasurable state of color in a limitless, infinite manner.” Though Klein’s life came to an untimely end in 1962, at the age of thirty-four, the profound impact of his work and career is still felt today.

The Shop takeover will include rare books and ephemera, such as Klein’s Dimanche 27 novembre 1960 “Le journal d’un seul jour” (1960), Les Fondements du Judo (1954), and Triptyque de Krefeld (1961), as well as the LP of La Conférence à la Sorbonne 1959 (1962). Photographs by René Burri and Pierre Boulat will also be on view, the former showing Klein at work in his studio and the latter documenting the opening of the 1961 exhibition Yves Klein: Monochrome und Feuer, Museum Haus Lange, Krefeld, Germany. Significant new and out-of-print monographs and exhibition catalogues will also be available.

The Paris Shop will be open along with our regular gallery exhibitions, Tuesday through Saturday, from 11am to 7pm. For inquiries about available publications, please contact rarebooks@gagosian.com or shop.paris@gagosian.com."

- press release