Yves Klein Untitled (IKB Stamps) For Sale

Yves Klein (1928–1962, Nice, France) was one of the most radically inventive and philosophically ambitious artists of the postwar era, a figure who in fewer than a dozen active years transformed the possibilities of painting, performance, sculpture, and conceptual art with an urgency and totality that has only grown in significance since his death at the age of thirty-four. The son of two painters, Klein grew up in an artistic household in Nice before his life was redirected, unexpectedly, by judo: he spent years studying in Japan, achieving a fourth-dan black belt, an experience that introduced him to Zen philosophy and a concept of presence, emptiness, and discipline that would run through all of his subsequent art.

Klein's most famous achievement was the development of International Klein Blue — IKB — a specific ultramarine pigment suspended in a synthetic resin binder that he developed in collaboration with a Parisian chemist and registered as his own. The colour, which possesses an extraordinary matte depth quite unlike standard artist's ultramarine, became the medium of his most significant works. His Monochromes — paintings of a single, unbroken IKB surface — proposed colour as the subject of painting rather than its vehicle, removing composition, form, and gesture in favour of pure chromatic experience. The works invite the viewer into something close to meditation, and their apparent simplicity conceals a philosophical position of genuine radicalism. His Anthropométries, made between 1960 and 1962, used the bodies of nude female models coated in IKB as living brushes, dragged or pressed against canvases before an audience in formal dress — works that anticipated performance art while producing objects of extraordinary physical beauty. His Sponge Sculptures — natural sea sponges saturated in IKB and mounted on metal — transformed found organic matter into objects of meditative concentration. His Fire Paintings, made by directing gas flames across treated cardboard, and his Cosmogonies, produced by exposing canvases to wind and rain, extended his investigation of elemental forces as artistic agents.

Klein's auction record stands at $36,700,000 for Le Rose du bleu (IKB 1957) at Sotheby's New York in 2012. Archisculpture achieved £12,700,000 at Christie's London in 2008, and Monochrome M 82 reached £5,800,000 at Sotheby's London in 2010. His influence on Conceptual Art, Minimalism, and performance art is incalculable; few artists who died so young have left a legacy of such sustained importance.

Klein's work is held at the Museum of Modern Art, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, Tate Modern, the Centre Pompidou, Museum Ludwig Cologne, the National Gallery of Art Washington, and the Hirshhorn Museum, among many others.

Guy Hepner offers expert guidance on Yves Klein prints and editions from our gallery at 177 Tenth Avenue, New York. Given the importance and market sensitivity of works by Klein, we bring rigorous attention to authentication and provenance with every transaction. We offer free, confidential valuations for collectors holding Klein works and connections to serious buyers worldwide.