He was a hard artist to categorize – some called him a neo-Dadaist, some a postmodernist, others a minimalist. Most agree on one thing, Yves Klein was a key component of the French Nouveau Realisme movement of the 1960s.
His parents were both painters, so he came by his artistic expressiveness naturally. Early in his career he started painting single-coloured canvases. Although most of these monochromes look identical, he felt they would illicit different experiences for each viewer. He experimented with paint by suspending pigment in synthetic resin; favouring the colour blue, an intense ultramarine hue. Klein developed a unique formula for what is now known as International Klein Blue (IKB). It has been available to the public since the early 1960s. "Blue is the invisible becoming visible. Blue has no dimensions, it is beyond the dimensions of which other colours partake,” said Klein. At times he painted dancers in IKB and had them create impressions on blank canvases with their bodies. He was a true visionary who pushed boundaries, enabling a colour to become the hero, opening a door for those who followed to explore new frontiers in conceptual art.
