Lévy Gorvy Dayan to Mount Risqué Yves Klein Survey Show

Yves Klein 1928-1962, France Follow +

New York gallery Lévy Gorvy Dayan today announced a daring Yves Klein exhibition that will take place from 11 April to 25 May.

Among its offerings, Yves Klein and the Tangible World will feature two provocative live performances.

The Symphonie ‘Monotone-Silence’ (1947–1961)—in which an orchestra and a choir come together to create just one note for 20 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of silence—has been performed in New York just once before. The city’s encore performance, scheduled for 1 May, will feature 60 performers at an off-site venue with capacity for 1,135.

The participatory work Sculpture Tactile (1957), which Klein failed to exhibit before his death aged 34, places a nude model inside a box with holes that allow audiences to reach in and feel them. It will be performed twice weekly during the exhibition.

The exhibition will also feature an International Klein Blue Pure Pigment pool floor sculpture conceived in 1957 and copies of Klein’s ‘newspaper’, Dimanche.

There will be rooms devoted to his flamethrower series ‘Peintures de feu’ and ‘Anthropométrie’—works created using women as ‘living brushes’.

The ‘Anthropométrie’ series and Sculpture Tactile are potentially challenging works to show in the current climate, which is in some ways more sexually conservative. Young people are having less sex, abortion rights have been repealed in parts of the United States, and the Me Too movement has made people more conscious of sexual exploitation.

Speaking to the BBC in 2014, Tate Modern’s then curator of contemporary art and performance Catherine Wood defended Klein, saying he ‘has been dismissed by some art historians as a charlatan or—because of his use of naked female models—as conventional and sexist, but his strategies were playfully critical and are becoming more significant in their influence for the younger generation.’

‘It could be argued that he was a critical prankster on par with Duchamp,’ she said. —[O]

Main image: Presentation of the Anthropométries de l'Époque Bleue at the Galerie Internationale d'Art Contemporain, 1960. Photograph © Harry Shunk and Janos Kender J.Paul Getty Trust. The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles.