The Sky as a Studio.
Yves Klein and his contemporaries
«The sky as a studio» reveals the aesthetic affinities Yves Klein developed with groups and movements like the Gutai in Japan, Spatialism in Italy, ZERO in Germany and the Nul group in the Netherlands. As a «space painter», Yves Klein projected art into a new odyssey with them. The sky, the air, the void and the cosmos became the immaterial workshop for reinventing art and man’s relationship with the world after the tabula rasa brought about by the war. [scroll down for more info]
Works by Günther Uecker, Otto Piene and Heinz Mack at Galerie Ludorff
As early as 1946, Yves Klein associated his name to the other side of the sky, appropriating this infinite space as one of his canvases, while the spatial artists close to Lucio Fontana tried out making «artificial forms appear in the sky, spectacular rainbows». The new visual arts strategies developed aim to go beyond the materiality of the work of art, seen as an obstacle to freedom, and venture into the experience of monochromy, emptiness and light, in gestures where the work is, like Lucio Fontana’s lacerated or perforated canvases, open to infinity.
The light works by Günther Uecker, Otto Piene and Heinz Mack, which evoke galaxies in formation, reveal their fears in the face of the threat of nuclear war. The body becomes the seismograph of this acute awareness that man must escape from the traumatised earth.