yves klein

Yves Klein was a french artist most commonly known for his blue painting and his experiments with performance art. Klein's art is very minimal as he worked mainly with one colour, blue. He started to develop his monochrome theories in the late 1940s, his first public expedition was Paris, 1955. He began in 1957 to experiment with fire paintings and 'immaterial zones of sensibility' and then in 1958 with 'Anthropometries' which were made by a nude model pressing herself against canvas under his directions, which was then filmed and also viewed live by guests.



He applied the paint himself or during one of the installations he had the models cover themselves in the paint as he directed exactly what to do. Here are the forms pressed against canvas, as you can see it really is very simple and almost abstract if you didn't know a woman had pushed herself against the material. My favourite is actually the one where she dragged her body across the canvas. I feel that that is the one that really links to metamorphosis as you can see the development/growth into the human form. I like how Klein's work breaks free from the pictorial convention of paintings, the colour is treated as an open space.