Despite being considered one of the most important artists of the twentieth century, and recognized by historiography (especially from the 1980s) as a total artist in the sense of a precursor of artistic movements such as the minimal, the conceptual art or the happening itself, an exclusive exhibition had never been devoted to the videos and performances of Yves Klein (1928-1962).
Videos kept by the Klein Archives in Paris, of which a special copy has been published on the occasion of the exhibition, will be screened at the exhibition. From the Propositions monochromes (1957) to the famous anthropometries of 1960 and 1961 in which the artist is fully aware of the power of recording and therefore – in a word that Klein himself likes so much – immaterialization of the artist. It is no longer about the video without more of the event of a creator (as it happens in the famous recording of Hans Namuth with Jackson Pollock as the protagonist); It is about video as a means -and end- of creation, with which Klein with his elegant clothes, his gaze at the camera as if rebuking the observer and his behavior on occasions certainly theatrical with the rigorous aside and everything, knows that what projected is already a work in itself, a creation that also shows the birth of a second, the case of anthropometries.
On the other hand, through different images and documents from various collections, there will be a tour of the various performances of the artist. These events were considered by Klein as absolutely fundamental; so much so that his earliest work is already proto-conceptual, when he seized and signed the blue sky of Nice in 1948.
Galería Cayón would like to thank the help provided by the Yves Klein Archives, Paris, without whose collaboration it would have been impossible to carry out this exhibition.
