Triptych "Monochrome and Fire (Triptyche de Krefeld)" (1961) (Unique piece)
Triptych "Monochrome and Fire (Triptyche de Krefeld)" (1961) (Unique piece)
Quick info
unique piece | serigraphs on cardboard | gold leaf on cardboard | framed | size 47 x 96 cm
Detailed description
Triptych "Monochrome and Fire (Triptyche de Krefeld)" (1961) (Unique piece)
The offered triptych "Monochrome and Fire" by Yves Klein was released on the occasion of the eponymous exhibition at the Haus Lange Museum in Krefeld in 1961. "Monochrome and Fire" was the only retrospective that took place during the artist's lifetime and the most comprehensive one that has been realised for him to this day. It featured architectural drawings, an "immaterial space," as well as innovative blue, pink, and golden monochromatic works.
Klein worked with his characteristic blue pigment throughout his entire artistic career, and only in his later work did his colour palette broadens. The gold was a product of his artist's book and the performance "Zone de Sensibilité Picturale Immatérielle" (1959-62).
2 serigraphs in blue and pink on cardboard and a cardboard covered with gold leaf, mounted as a triptych in an object box, 1961. motif size/sheet size 32 x 23.5 cm. Size in frame 47 x 96 cm as shown.
About Yves Klein
Yves Klein (1928-1962) worked with his characteristic blue pigment throughout his artistic career. It was only in his late work that he broadened his colour palette.
Klein later recounted a formative experience and thus also provides an explanation for his obsession with the colour blue: "As I lay stretched upon the beach of Nice, I began to feel hatred for birds which flew back and forth across my blue sky, cloudless sky, because they tried to bore holes in my greatest and most beautiful work."
Klein is considered an important pioneer of the Nouveau Realisme genre. However, the conceptual works of the internationally renowned Frenchman are also close to the works of the German ZERO movement around Otto Piene, Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker and the Arte Povera of, for example, Lucio Fontana.
Term for paintings and sculptures that are detached from the representational depiction, which spread throughout the entire western and parts of the eastern world from around 1910 onwards in ever new stylistic variations. The Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, born in 1866, is considered the founder of abstract art. Other important artists of abstract art are K.S. Malewitsch, Piet Mondrian, and others.
A one-of-a-kind or unique piece is a work of art that has been personally created by the artist. It exists only once due to the type of production (oil painting, watercolours, drawing, etc.).
In addition to the classic unique pieces, there exist the so-called "serial unique pieces". They present a series of works with the same colour, motif and technique, manually prepared by the same artist. The serial unique pieces are rooted in "serial art", a type of modern art, that aims to create an aesthetic effect through series, repetitions and variations of the same objects or themes or a system of constant and variable elements or principles.
In the history of arts, the starting point of this trend was the work "Les Meules" (1890/1891) by Claude Monet, in which for the first time a series was created that went beyond a mere group of works. The other artists, who addressed to the serial art, include Claude Monet, Piet Mondrian and above all Gerhard Richter.