"La Vénus d’Alexandrie (Vénus Bleue)"
Blue pigment on plaster. Height 69 cm. Numbered 287/300 at the bottom of the sculpture and with the artist's star in relief. Also stamped "Vénus Bleue de Yves Klein. Exemplaire No 287/300. 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.
Literature
P. Restany, "Yves Klein", 1982, p. 204 (another example illustrated in color).
Exhibition catalogue Museet for Samtidskunst Oslo, "Yves Klein", 1997, p. 79, no. 66 (another example illustrated in color).
J.-P. Ledeur, "Yves Klein: Catalogue Raisonné of Editions and Sculptures", 2000, p. 234, no. S41 (another example illustrated in colour).
N. Charlet, Yves Klein, Paris, 2000, p. 231 (another example illustrated in colour).
Exhibition catalogue Musee d'art moderne et d'art contemporain de Nice, "Yves Klein, La Vie, la vie elle-même qui est l'art absolu", 2000, p. 183 (another example illustrated in colour).
More information
Yves Klein was born in 1928 and was one of the foremost figures in the Nouveau réalisme art movement. Today he is best remembered for his Klein-blue objects. In his far too short life, he was also a pioneer in performance art, the most subversive direction in art after cubism.
One interpretation of what drove Klein was the ability
to embrace and own everything that is beautiful. He
conquered the azure-blue sky by simply stating that he had invented its colour, International Klein Blue (IKB), which he did in 1957. The consistent blue of IKB runs through his art work and he used it for several types of monochrome work in dierent materials. It was also used in several of his best-known series, including “Anthropometry” in which naked women painted with pigment made impressions of their bodies on canvas.
Klein’s claims were not “merely” limited to the sky and
the sea. 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.
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Image rights
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