Klein, Yves

(born April 28, 1928, Nice, Fr.—died June 6, 1962, Paris) French painter, sculptor, and performance artist. With no formal artistic training, he began in the mid 1950s to exhibit nonobjective paintings in which a canvas was uniformly covered in a single colour, usually blue; he also used the technique for sculptural figures and reliefs. In 1958 he produced a near-riot with an “exhibition of emptiness,” an empty gallery painted white, titled The Void. He used a variety of unorthodox methods to produce pictures, such as imprints of the human body on paper or canvas (anthropométries). His work was deliberately extreme and experimental. A member of Fluxus, he greatly influenced the development of Minimalism.

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