Yves Klein (28 April 1928 – 6 June 1962) was a French artist considered an important figure in post-war European art. He is the leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau Réalisme founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany. Klein was a pioneer in the development of Performance Art, and is seen as an inspiration to and as a forerunner of Minimal Art, as well as Pop Art.
At the age of nineteen, Klein and his artist friends, Arman Fernandez and Claude Pascal, laid on a beach in the south of France, and divided the world between themselves; Arman chose the earth, Claude, words, while Yves chose the ethereal space surrounding the planet, which he then proceeded to sign. With this symbolic gesture of signing the sky, Klein had foreseen the thrust of his art from that time onwards—a quest to reach the far side of the infinite.
At the beginning of his career Klein had painted monochromes. One of his first exhibition, ‘Proposte Monochrome, Epoca Blu’, featuring 11 identical blue canvases, using ultramarine pigment suspended in a synthetic resin ‘Rhodopas’.
Yves Klein is probably best known for his signature shade of blue and for the paintings he created using naked models as paintbrushes, but he also made a foray into the world of furniture design.
The result was his Table Blue, still in production and available to the public.
The table is essentially a plexiglass box, supported by metal legs and filled with pigment in Yves’ international blue. It also comes in pink (the Table Rose) and Gold (the Table Or, filled with 3,000 sheets of gold leaf).
The Yves Klein tables are produced today by Artware and are also available at David Gill in London, gallery that represents artists like Zaha Hadid, Mattia Bonetti, Campana Brothers or Fredrikson Stallard.
