Le Ciel comme atelier. Yves Klein and his contemporaries

Le ciel comme atelier – The exhibition is accompanied by a richly illustrated catalog that places Yves Klein’s work in its historical context and puts into perspective the sources of inspiration and the permeability between his research and that of his German, Italian and Japanese contemporaries.
Unpublished essays by art historians develop the main themes of the exhibition. Emma Lavigne, president of the Palais de Tokyo and curator of the exhibition, explores the quest for immaterial sensitivity that runs through the performative dimension of Yves Klein’s work, particularly his Journal d’un Jour. Luca Massimo Barbero, director of the Institute of Art History of the Giorgio Cini Foundation and associate curator of the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, examines the central role of Lucio Fontana in the approach to space by artists of this period. Yuko Hasegawa, artistic director of the Tokyo Museum of Contemporary Art (MOT), discusses the relationship between Yves Klein and the aesthetics of the Japanese avant-garde around the notion of the void. Antje Kramer-Mallordy, lecturer at the University of Rennes 2, analyzes the federating role of exhibitions in the collaboration between Yves Klein and the ZERO movement.
Frédéric Migayrou, deputy director of the Musée national d’art moderne in charge of industrial creation, examines Yves Klein’s emblematic Architecture de l’air, a project for the conquest of space through sensitivity, in the light of post-war architectural utopias.
Among the authors who bring their expertise to this book by analyzing the specific intersections of the works of Yves Klein and some of his peers, we find Valérie Da Costa, Hélène Guenin, Noémi Joly, Giovanni Lista, Florence de Mèredieu, Aomi Okabe, Sophia Sotke or Dominique Stella.