"At first glance the iconic image symbolises the epitome of freedom."Ben Brown

Yves Klein was an artist who took the plunge. In 1960, Yves Klein launched himself off the top of a building in Paris in the name of art. He plunged into the air for a photograph entitled Saut Dans Le Vide (translated as Leap Into The Void) in order to come as close as physically possible to space, a concept which fascinated him.

“To paint space, I owe it to myself to go there, into space itself”

Yves Klein

Today, at first glance the iconic image symbolises the epitome of freedom: the artist appears to fly as he soars in a space otherwise out of man’s reach. However Klein’s intentions delved far deeper. Fascinated by the concept of infinite space and immateriality, Klein approached space simply by immersing himself in it: “to paint space, I owe it to myself to go there, into space itself”.

While in this work Klein appears to be the one diving into the unknown, piercing a monochrome sky we can only hope or imagine to be a similar hue to his famous ultramarine, Klein frequently invites us, the viewer, to take our own plunge into his works.

Yves Klein was most famous for his International Klein Blue (IKB), an ultramarine inspired by the sky which he registered as his own trademark colour in 1957, demonstrating his commitment to its spiritually uplifting power. As he once said, “at first there is nothing, then there is a profound nothingness, after that a blue profundity”. Klein produced almost two hundred intense, monochrome canvasses of IKB, identified as IKB.

To the untrained eye they may appear simplistic blocks of colour. To the slightly more informed eye, they may bring to mind the bold colour blocks of the Ukrainian Suprematist Kazimir Malevich. Regardless of previous artistic knowledge, one common reaction when faced with one of Klein’s IKB paintings is a feeling of being drawn into the void, of wanting to plunge into the blue.

 On the opening of a Klein exhibition at Tate Liverpool in 2016, art critic Jonathan Jones wrote that “sinking into the art of Yves Klein is like diving into a clear blue sea – and finding it’s far deeper and stranger than you’d expected”. Klein chose to hang his IKB paintings in such a way that they would protrude slightly from the wall, projecting out into the viewer’s space.

Klein himself was fascinated by the concept of infinite space surrounding the universe; through the quasi-conceptual works of his IKB paintings and his Leap Into The Void The projection of his IKB canvasses and the illusion of depth created by the special treatment of the pigment seem nothing short of an invitation to launch oneself into his work: into the blue void. By subtly bringing his canvasses towards us, he facilitates our escapism, pushing us to “think big”