The Sky as a Studio

From 18 July 2020, the Centre Pompidou-Metz presents an exhibition devoted to Yves Klein (1928-1962), a major figure on the post-war French and European art scene. "Le ciel comme atelier" reveals the aesthetic affinities he developed, beyond the New Realists, with a constellation of artists, from Gutai in Japan to the Spatialists in Italy, from ZERO in Germany to the Nul group in the Netherlands. As a "painter of space", Yves Klein projected art into a new odyssey with them. The sky, the air, the void and the cosmos were the immaterial workshop for reinventing art and man's relationship with the world after the tabula rasa of the war. As early as 1946, Yves Klein signed his name to the reverse side of the sky, appropriating this infinite space as one of his canvases, while the spatialists around Lucio Fontana ventured to make "artificial forms appear in the sky, marvellous rainbows". Piero Manzoni embarked on a quest for a limitless space in which "matter becomes pure energy", in response to Klein's search for immaterial pictorial sensibility and Otto Piene's vision of art as a sensory and regenerative medium that reconnects man with the universe.