Blenheim Palace To Host Yves Klein’s Most Comprehensive UK Exhibition To Date

Blenheim Art Foundation is set to present Yves Klein at Blenheim Palace, a solo exhibition by the visionary French artist, running 18 July – 7 October 2018. The exhibition, which is presented in collaboration with the Yves Klein Estate, coincides with what would have been the artist’s ninetieth birthday year. It will explore concepts of beauty, sensibility and the sublime, offering visitors a unique opportunity to view Klein’s seminal artworks in the landmark setting of the World Heritage listed eighteenth-century palace.

Featuring over 50 artworks, this will be the most comprehensive exhibition of Yves Klein in the UK to date. Visitors will be able to explore Klein’s wide-ranging practice, including painting, sculpture and large-scale installation. One of the most influential artists of his generation, his pioneering artistic experiments anticipated and inspired movements in conceptual art, minimalism and performance. Klein is best known for the development of his own vivid ultramarine pigment, International Klein Blue, which became a symbolic part of his practice.

Yves Klein at Blenheim Palace will feature a large-scale blue pigment installation and a number of Klein’s Monochrome Paintings, the striking colours transforming the visitor’s aesthetic experience of the opulent baroque surroundings of the Great Hall and principal rooms. Paintings from his ground-breaking Anthropometry series will also be on display, for which Klein employed models as ‘living brushes’ to create marks on the canvas in front of an audience, as well as Fire Paintings and Klein’s later works in gold.

Michael Frahm, Director of Blenheim Art Foundation, said: “We are delighted to mark our fifth year by paying homage to Yves Klein, one of the most significant artists of the 20th century. Yves’ ideas have been hugely influential on generations of artists and his radical thinking influenced minimal, conceptual and performance art by pushing the boundaries of what art could be. This exhibition will celebrate the universal sensibility of Yves’ language and I hope it will touch visitors of all ages with its timeless, enduring and spiritual effect.”

With its fifth art exhibition, Blenheim Art Foundation continues to produce bold encounters between the world’s most influential artists, the Palace, and new and recurring visitors. The Foundation’s award-winning programme has earned a reputation for pushing boundaries by inviting artists to engage directly with the Palace’s interiors and particular history, as well as showcasing some of the most celebrated and seismic artworks and movements in art history, from Michelangelo Pistoletto’s Arte Povera to Jenny Holzer’s testimonies of war by contemporary veterans.

Yves Klein at Blenheim Palace | 18 July – 7 October 2018

Feature image: Untitled Blue Monochrome (IKB 67), 1959 © Yves Klein Estate, ADAGP, Paris / DACS, London, 2018