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Artists: Günther Uecker - Yves Klein

Lévy Gorvy Dayan presents Material States: Yves Klein and Günther Uecker, an exhibition exploring connections between Yves Klein (1928–1962) and Günther Uecker (b. 1930). Titans of Europe’s postwar avant-garde, Klein and Uecker developed radically alternative visual languages at a time when artistic traditions were increasingly questioned and dismantled. The artists’ lives converged in manifold ways, and, in January 1962, Klein married Uecker’s sister Rotraut, rendering the two family. Material States includes major works by each artist, including Uecker’s poignant Hommage à Yves Klein II, created the same year as Klein’s untimely death at the age of 34.

Both Klein and Uecker experienced the devastation of the Second World War at a young age. As emerging artists, they rallied against traditions they saw as lifeless and authoritarian, turning to unorthodox methods and media. Combining belief in scientific progress with deeply felt spiritual ideas and poetic transformations of unconventional materials, their practices sought to instigate transformative moments of pure perception. Material States includes significant works from critical periods in their oeuvres, including Uecker’s Das gelbe Bild (1957–58) and Klein’s gold-leaf panel Le silence est d’or (MG 10, 1960).

In the late 1950s, influenced by Eastern philosophies and Gregorian chanting, Uecker began a ritual of hammering nails onto canvas, panels, and objects, to achieve complex patterns of light and shadow without recourse to traditional methods associated with the history of painting. In the exhibition, alongside the sculpture Weisse Strukturzone from 1959, the painting Das gelbe Bild of 1957–58 captures the experimentation that would result in the biomorphically shifting pictorial fields of works like Bewegtes Feld II (1963).

Klein first exhibited his monochromes in 1955, and worked with pigment and synthetic resin to create surfaces that disbanded conventional ideas of painting and embodied concepts of the infinite and the immaterial. Inspired by sources from Zen Buddhism to the writing of Eugène Delacroix, Klein invested color with metaphysical symbolism, arriving at the three hues that would dominate his oeuvre from the late 1950s: blue, gold, and rose. Le silence est d’or demonstrates Klein’s expert navigation between a principal material state and transcendent experience, alongside the IKB saturated fields of Monochrome bleu sans titre (IKB 231, 1959) and Relief Planétaire “Région de Grenoble” (RP 10, 1961/90).

In the early ’60s, Uecker joined Heinz Mack and Otto Piene in the movement Group Zero—a selfproclaimed “ground zero” for artists wanting to reformulate the conditions for art in a rapidly modernizing society—with which Klein was also increasingly associated. Works from this period include Hommage à Yves Klein II and Peinture de feu sans titre (F 78, 1961), which reveal how the artists positioned physical, performative processes at the core of their practices. For Uecker, the activity of hammering nails across a surface acts as a conduit to express emotions that span anger, trauma, hope, and release. Klein’s alchemical fire paintings—synonymous with their act of creation—unravel the fragile boundaries between genesis and destruction, life and death.

Through the exhibition’s illumination of important works from key moments in the artistic lives of Klein and Uecker, Material States considers the radical material and aesthetic effects that are channeled through their works—paying homage to the shared history, imagination, and ideas that continue to resonate to the present day.