Target Free Thursday Nights in December feature a series of events related to the Walker Art Center exhibition Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers (on view through February 13, 2011). Patrons are invited to participate in École de Klein, a curriculum of gallery talks, blue screams, judo demonstrations, pigment-inventing, and conversations/tours in French, that seeks to bring visitors closer to this many-faceted and revolutionary thinker.
A visionary and provocateur, Yves Klein took the European art scene by storm in a career that lasted just eight years, from 1954 to 1962. An innovator who embraced painting, sculpture, performance, photography, music, theater, film, architecture, and theoretical writing, Klein was a precursor of many movements to the postwar avant-garde, including Minimalism, conceptual art, land art, and performance art. He self-identified as “the painter of space,” seeking to achieve immaterial sensibility through pure color–primarily an ultramarine blue of his own invention, International Klein Blue. Through these and other experiments, Klein aimed to reach “beyond the problematic in art” and rethink the world in spiritual and aesthetic terms, creating a pivotal transition between modern art’s concern with material objects and contemporary notions about the conceptual nature of art.