Sculptures

Blue pigment on plaster. Stamped "Vénus Bleue de Yves Klein. Exemplaire HC. Éditions Galerie Bonnier, Genève. Réalisation Jean-Paul Ledeur - Paris", below base. Concieved in 1962 by Yves Klein and casted in 1982 by Galerie Bonnier, Geneva in cooperation with Jean-Paul Ledeur, Paris. Edition 300 + 50 HC.
Yves Klein was a French artist and an important figure in post-war European art. He was a leading member of the French artistic movement of Nouveau réalisme founded in 1960 by art critic Pierre Restany. Klein's practice was strongly influenced by the originality, irreverence and wit of the French artist Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968)

This sculpture is in Klein’s famous IKB. It stands for International Klein Blue, a distinctive ultramarine which Klein registered as a trademark colour in 1957. He considered that this colour had a quality close to pure space and he associated it with immaterial values beyond what can be seen or touched. He conquered the azure-blue sky by simply stating that he had invented its colour.

“He also re-invented works by great artists of the past. Yves Klein made a number of plaster versions of world-famous works, which he covered with his deep, matt, and unmistakable blue pigment, thus abolishing the boundaries between colour, sculpture, performance, time and space. His “La Vénus d'Alexandrie (Vénus Bleue)” is one of his most popular and well-known works. It can almost be described as an appropriation of the Greek sculpture “Venus de Milo” depicting the goddess called Aphrodite by the Greeks and Venus by the Romans. In 1970, Klein’s widow Rotraut Klein-Moquay and Jan Runnqvist at Galerie Bonnier decided to complete one of his projects and this edition of 300 was finally completed in 1982 and was presented for the first time at the opening
of the Chicago Art Fair the same year.

Another example of this edition is in the collections of
The Metropolitan Museum in New York.” Bukowskis

High 69 cm
Provenance:
Gallerie Bonnier, Geneve
Galleri Christian Larsen, Stockholm
Acquired from the above