Sky as a Studio

open to the public until February 1st,  2021
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Centre Pompidou-Metz dedicates an ambitious exhibition to Yves Klein, a major figure of the European post-war artistic scene. Well-known for his blue monochromes, he dialogued with numerous European artists belonging to the NUL group in the Netherlands and to the ZERO group in Germany. From May 2020, visitors will (re)discover the artist’s practices through the multiple international exchanges he had. The works of this generation of artists, impulsed with the freedom that followed the end of the Second World War, resolutely reorientate our eyes towards outerspace, proposing an approach to art and to the universe detached from all materiality. Yves Klein exchanged closely with ZERO to explore, the time of an exhibition, colour, light and vibration. Through fire, water, earth and air, Otto Piene, Heinz Mack and Günther Uecker sought to create a void by using these natural elements.
With his friend Lucio Fontana, Yves Klein explores the spatialist movement, which determined a unit of time and space born from the interaction with the viewer. Shaken up by the conquest of outer-space, these artists appropriated the sky through representations of the cosmos and creations of aerial sculptures. Yves Klein thus developed an « Architecture of the Air » (1958-1961), where the sky, infinite and immaterial, became his workshop. Above and beyond his interest in painting, he combines character and matter, refuses technique and instruments of representation in order to devote himself to an intensive body (Saut dans le vide (jump into emptiness), 1960). The body is « the instrument of a qualitative evaluation » which he uses to paint space: « I am duty bound to go into space, without fraud or trickery [...], the painter of space must go there by himself ». An area inhabited by the sensitivity of each, according to the artist. The exhibition is the opportunity to present contemporary works, but also to reactivate little performed shows.
List of Artists:
Bernard Aubertin, Claude Bellegarde, Alberto Burri, Enrico Castellani, Constant, Dadamaino, Lucio Fontana, Hans Haacke, Hiroshi Hamaya, Oskar Holweck, Eikoh Hosoe, Fumio Kamei, Akira Kanayama, Kikuji Kawada, Yves Klein, Gyula Kosice, Yayoi Kusama, Liliane Ljin, Heinz Mack, Piero Manzoni, Sadamasa Motonaga, Saburo Murakami, Henk Peeters, Otto Piene, Giuseppe Pinot-Gallizio, Roberto Rossellini, Rotraut, Shozo Shimamoto, Fujiko Shiraga, Kazuo Shiraga, Takis, Jean Tinguely, Günther Uecker, Jef Verheyen, Lothar Wolleh, Gil J. Wolman.