Yves Klein, Infinite Blue (Immersive Exhibition)

What it was

Yves Klein, l'infini bleu was a projected, room-scale homage to the French artist Yves Klein (1928–1962), produced by Culturespaces for the Atelier des Lumières, its digital art center in a former foundry in Paris's 11th arrondissement. It opened on 28 February 2020 as the shorter companion program to the venue's main show of that year, and drew on around 90 works and 60 archive images, set to music including Vivaldi and electronic pieces by Thylacine.

The timing was unlucky. Within weeks the Covid-19 pandemic closed French cultural venues, and the program's run was interrupted. Scheduled dates were published variously as running to 31 October 2020 or into January 2021. Culturespaces later showed it at the Bassins des Lumières in Bordeaux in 2021 and brought it back to Paris in the summer of 2023.

What you are looking at

The photograph shows an empty hall plunged into deep ultramarine. Freestanding walls and curved screens, black steel columns and the floor are all washed with blue imagery: pale, rocky textures streaked with darker blue, like a relief map, a cliff face or the cratered surface of a planet. The effect is of standing inside the color. Round shapes on the floor and the industrial structure of the building remain visible as dark silhouettes.

That sensation was the point. Klein wanted viewers not to look at blue but to be immersed in it, and an immersive projection is in some ways closer to his ambitions than a white-walled museum.

Yves Klein and International Klein Blue

Born in Nice in 1928, Klein was a judo master, a showman and one of the most influential artists of postwar Europe. From the mid-1950s he made monochrome paintings, canvases covered in a single color, and from 1957 he concentrated on one deep ultramarine. With the help of a Paris paint supplier he developed a binder that kept dry pigment as intense as possible on the canvas, and in 1960 he registered the formula with the French authorities as International Klein Blue (IKB). For Klein the blue was immaterial, a window onto infinite space and the void; he called himself "the painter of space."

The exhibition went beyond the monochromes. It covered his Anthropometries, in which paint-covered models pressed their bodies onto canvas in public performances; his Cosmogonies, made by exposing canvases to rain and wind; his sponge reliefs; and his Planetary Reliefs, blue maps of the earth's surface seen as if from space. Klein died of a heart attack in 1962, aged thirty-four.

Close looking

The textures in the photograph appear to come from Klein's relief works, the Planetary Reliefs or sponge reliefs, enlarged until a few centimeters of pigment and plaster become cliffs several meters high. Pay attention to how the projection handles the blue. On a screen, IKB loses the velvety, light-absorbing depth of raw pigment, and the animators compensate with darkness: the hall is kept nearly black, so the blue reads as a source of light. The stools and columns cast long shadows across the floor, a reminder of the physical space Klein's paintings always tried to dissolve.

Why it mattered

Following the success of Van Gogh, la nuit étoilée in 2019, Culturespaces used its short programs to introduce visitors to less obvious artists. Klein was a good fit: his work is about sensation and immersion, and his blue already looks like light. Critics who doubted immersive exhibitions as a way to show old masters were more open to it here, because Klein's own work included performance, music (his Monotone-Silence Symphony, a single sustained chord followed by silence) and theatrical display.

The Atelier des Lumières

The venue occupies the former Chemin Vert foundry, built in 1835 and run for over a century as a family ironworks making parts for the navy and railways. Culturespaces converted it into a digital art center that opened in 2018. The main hall covers around 1,500 square meters, with walls up to ten meters high, preserved steel columns and a central water tank, all of which become projection surfaces. Programs are shown in a continuous loop, with a main show of a famous painter and shorter contemporary or thematic pieces in between. Visitors can walk freely through the space, sit, or stay for several cycles.

Related works

For the earlier Atelier program, see Van Gogh, la nuit étoilée. For other painters who pushed color toward abstraction, compare Jackson Pollock's The Deep and Number 1 (Lavender Mist), and Monet's late Water Lilies. More on the artist on the Yves Klein page.

Where to see Klein's work

Klein's paintings and objects are held by the Centre Pompidou in Paris, MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York, Tate in London, and other museums. Several of his monochromes and reliefs are on public view in Paris at the Centre Pompidou.