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Yves Klein Quotes
1928–1962 France
Yves Klein (28 April 1928 – 6 June 1962) was a French artist and is considered an important figure in post-war European art. He made a lot of monochrome paintings, mostly in his famous blue, and in gold colour.
Random Yves Klein quote
11 quotes
Space is waiting for our love, as I am longing for you; go with me, travelling through space.. [line in a poem of Klein himself]
This period of blue monochrome was the product of my pursuit of the indefinable in painting which that master, Eugène Delacroix [Romantic French painter] was able to indicate even in his day.
The glaring obviousness of my paternity of monochromy in the twentieth century is such that even if I myself were to fight hard against that fact I should probably never manage to rid myself of it.
I am against the line and all its consequences: contours, forms, composition. All paintings of whatever sort, figuratives or abstract, seem to me like prison windows in which the lines, precisely are the bars.
A bill for 20 grams of Pure Gold, for one painted area of sensibilized immaterial. [about 1958, text on a bill for selling 'air']
In 1946, when I was still an adolescent, I went and signed my name on the other side of the sky during a fantastic 'realistico-imaginary' voyage.
The essential of painting is that something, that 'ethereal glue', that intermediary product which the artist secretes with all his creative being and which he has to place, to encrust, to impregnate into the pictorial stuff of the painting.
In case the buyer wishes this act of integration of the work of art with himself to take place, Yves Klein must.. ..plus two witness, throw half of the gold received in the ocean, into a river or in some place of nature where this gold cannot be retrieved by anyone. From this moment on, the immaterial pictorial sensitivity zone belongs to the buyer absolutely and intrinsically.
It was pure chance that led me to judo. Judo has helped me to understand that pictorial space is above al the product of spiritual exercises. Judo is in fact the discovery by the human body of a spiritual space.
I want to take as the canvas for my next picture the entire surface of France. This picture will be called 'The Blue Revolution'. It isn’t the fact of my taking power in France that interests me, but rather the possibility of creating a monochrome picture in my new manner: ‘The Refinement of Sensibility’.
Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond dimensions, whereas the other colours are not. They are pre-psychological expanses, red, for example, presupposing a site radiating heat.. .All colours arouse specific associative ideas, psychologically material or tangible, while blue suggests at most the sea and sky, and they, after all, are in actual, visible nature what is most abstract.
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