After his first monochrome paintings in the ultramarine he called “IKB” (International Klein Blue), produced in the late mid-1950s, all Yves Klein’s work reflected one single idea. For him, the role of the artist was to seize on beauty wherever it might be found and to reveal it to others. As here in this large-format painting IKB 3, blue was for Klein charged with sensibility and apt to assist the passage from material to immaterial: “All colours generate associations to concrete, material, and tangible ideas…while blue evokes at most the sea and the sky, which are what is most abstract in...

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After his first monochrome paintings in the ultramarine he called “IKB” (International Klein Blue), produced in the late mid-1950s, all Yves Klein’s work reflected one single idea. For him, the role of the artist was to seize on beauty wherever it might be found and to reveal it to others. As here in this large-format painting IKB 3, blue was for Klein charged with sensibility and apt to assist the passage from material to immaterial: “All colours generate associations to concrete, material, and tangible ideas…while blue evokes at most the sea and the sky, which are what is most abstract in tangible and visible nature.”

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