BRUSSELS.- This spring, in cooperation with Tate Liverpool, BOZAR Centre for Fine Arts presents a monographic exhibition devoted to the French artist Yves Klein (1928–1962). Klein created paintings and sculptures, influenced the development of performance art, wrote works for the theatre and music and also experimented with radical architecture. He became renowned, above all, for his use of a vivid ultramarine pigment (International Klein Blue – IKB). His monochrome paintings in this characteristic deep blue shade gave expression to his ideas about Zen and spiritual infinity. Klein sought to express absolute immateriality and infinite space through pure colour.

Klein’s short but spectacular career shook the European art world to its foundations. Even though he died at just 34 years of age from a heart attack, he left behind a groundbreaking body of work. The exhibition pays tribute to his pioneering work, which paved the way for movements such as conceptual and minimalist art, installations, and performance art.

Yves Klein: Theatre of the Void presents 30 works offering visitors a broad spectrum of this influential artist’s extraordinary creativity. The exhibition includes work from Klein’s major series, including the monochrome paintings in IKB, the exceptionally pure ultramarine with which he gave his works a depthless sense of space. For his Anthropometry paintings, during a live performance, Klein used naked models as living brushes to apply blue paint to the canvas. His Fire Paintings, canvases on which he went to work with a flame-thrower, are also represented in the Brussels exhibition. As fire is an intangible phenomenon that is too diffuse to be captured, Klein’s use of fire reflects his aspiration to express the immaterial through art. Visitors will also be able to discover his sponge works and planetary reliefs.

The works on show are complemented by rarely seen films and photographs, which show how Klein shaped his own image via personal photographs and advertising material that show him as an artist, a visionary, a judoka, and in many more guises. A work that he created at the age of nineteen epitomises Klein’s grandiose imagination, the artist claiming the infinite blue sky as his own work of art by symbolically signing it with his finger.