Yves Klein at Blenheim Palace

On the occasion of its fifth exhibition, Blenheim Art Foundation organised a major survey of Yves Klein’s work, presented in collaboration with the Yves Klein Estate. The exhibition coincided with the ninetieth anniversary of the artist’s birth.

Featuring over 50 artworks, visitors were able to explore Klein’s wide-ranging practice, including painting, sculpture and large-scale installation. One of the most influential artists of his generation, his pioneering artistic experiments anticipated and inspired movements in conceptual art, minimalism and performance art. Klein is best known for the development of his own vivid ultramarine pigment, International Klein Blue (IKB), which became a symbolic part of his practice, a key to reaching the ‘infinite’ and ‘sublime’ through pure colour.

‘Yves Klein at Blenheim Palace’ featured a large-scale blue pigment installation and a number of Klein’s ‘Monochrome Paintings’, the dazzling uninterrupted colour punctuating and transforming the visitor’s experience of the opulent baroque surroundings of The Great Hall and principal rooms. A painting from his groundbreaking ‘Anthropometry series’ was also on display, for which Klein employed models as “living brushes” to create marks on the canvas in front of an audience, as well as one of his late ‘Fire Paintings’ and works in gold. Klein blended traditional artistic mediums and imagery with dynamic techniques and performance, erasing the boundaries between process and artwork. ‘Sponge Sculptures’, made from the sponges Klein painted with, saturated with pigment were on show alongside other free-standing works inspired by Classical Greek sculptures such as a number of ‘Blue Venus’ works, coated in IKB.