Untitled blue Sponge Sculpture, (SE 318)

Yves Klein’s Sculpture éponge bleue incorporates two of the artist’s most important motifs—the sponge and his eponymous pigment, International Klein Blue. Throughout his short, but inventive career Klein sought to abandon the competing duopoly of abstraction and figuration, instead searching for new ways to express the sublime nature of art, and in the process devising an entirely unique form of artistic expression. For Klein, color was not a representative tool, but rather a real, living presence that had the power to impregnate its surroundings and absorb its onlookers. The purer the pigment, Klein believed, the easier it would be to conquer its own material boundaries and transport the viewer into another world—into the void. Having grown up surrounded by the deep azure of the Mediterranean, Klein considered blue to be the most immaterial of all colors, infused with the infinity of sea and sky.

Early in his career, Klein also began to notice the absorbent potential of sponge as a means of capturing the immaterial properties of his pigment. “The sponge has that extraordinary capacity to absorb and become impregnated with whatever fluid,” he said, “which was naturally very seductive to me. Thanks to the natural and living nature of sponges, I was able to make portraits to the readers of my monochromes, which, after having seen and travelled into the blue of my paintings, returned from them completely impregnated with sensibility, just as the sponges” (Y. Klein, in Overcoming the Problematics of Art: The Writings of Yves Klein, New York 2007, p. 22).