Yves Klein and the Tangible World
11 April - 25 May 2024
Lévy Gorvy Dayan
19 East 64 Street
At just 34 years old, Yves Klein’s untimely death in 1962 halted a deeply prolific career phase. A new exhibition at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, Yves Klein and the Tangible World, will feature many works never-before exhibited in New York, focusing on Klein’s simultaneous explorations of figuration and abstraction (and sensuality and physicality) in the years leading up to his death.
Staged across multiple floors of Lévy Gorvy Dayan's landmarked Beaux-Arts townhouse, Yves Klein and the Tangible World will include twice-weekly nude-model performances of a participatory sculpture that Klein never exhibited during his lifetime (Sculpture Tactile, 1957), which features a nude model inside a boxlike structure with holes intended for audiences to reach in and feel.
On the first floor of the gallery, visitors will encounter a large-scale International Klein Blue Pure Pigment pool floor sculpture originally conceived in 1957, as well as a monumental 1960 blue-and-gold Anthropométrie (Klein's body of work featuring imprints of women as "living brushes" for the paint application). In another exhibition highlight, copies of Klein’s 'newspaper' Dimanche will be shared with guests in English, French, and Chinese.
Also on view as part of the exhibition will be rooms devoted to Klein’s Anthropométries and his Peintures de feu (fire paintings, made with an actual flame thrower as seen in archival imagery), as well as museum-style educational resources including rare archival material in vitrines, and an elaborate, offsite, one-night-only performance of the Symphonie “Monotone-Silence” (1947-1961).
The meditative, avant-garde symphony has been performed just one other time in New York (by Dominique Lévy Gallery in 2013, for a sold-out audience of 810 guests). The upcoming performance, scheduled for May 1, will be the most ambitious New York iteration to date, with a venue capacity of 1,135 and over 60 performers between the orchestra and choir.
The exhibition will integrate the invaluable curatorial insights of Yves Klein’s widow Rotraut Klein-Moquay (née Uecker; the sister of Günther Uecker), an artist herself who served as a studio assistant and nude model to Klein, and who was seven months pregnant with Yves Klein Jr. at the time of her husband's death at age 34. — Read more in the press release linked here.
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More information is in the above-linked press release, and a preview of works on view is below. See the Dropbox folder linked above to download web-resolution image files. Artwork information is in each image’s file title. Image reuse must be exclusively in association with press coverage of Yves Klein and the Tangible World, with the credit line “courtesy of Lévy Gorvy Dayan” appended to indicated copyrights (e.g. Courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan. © The Estate of Yves Klein c/o ARS, New York / ADAGP, Paris).
