Invisible artwork worth more than 1 million USD

At Sotheby’s auction in Paris last week, Yves Klein’s “Zone de sensibilité picturale immatérielle” or “Empty space” sold for 1,063. 000 euros ($1,155,705) including taxes and fees, three times the original estimate. According to Sotheby’sa private collector in Europe purchased the work.

Works of art are invisible, ie non-existent. Buyer only owns a receipt designed to look like a check, dated December 7, 1959 and signed by the artist. Renowned antique dealer Jacques Kugel bought this invisible work from Yves Klein in 1959 for 20 grams of gold. Through many changes of hands, the work was bought by French collector and art consultant Loïc Malle from the Galerie 1900-2000 in Paris in 1986 and kept until it was put up for auction. Receipts have been displayed at many major art institutes in Europe such as Hayward Gallery in London, Center Pompidou in Paris…

Yves Klein began selling intangible works – on receipt – from 1959 until his death in 1962. The artist offers collectors the opportunity to purchase a series of non-existent, purely functional works. concept, in exchange for pure gold. Klein grants them a receipt for possession of his imaginary space, which Klein calls the Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility.

According to CNN, the artist gives the collector a choice: burn the receipt with a ritual or keep it. If they choose to burn, they will be considered “the ultimate owners of the artwork”. The receipt burning ceremony was performed in front of the buyer and witnesses selected by Klein. The painter also poured half of the gold collected into the Seine. According to him, this action helps “rebalance the natural order” between buyers and sellers. In the case of keeping receipts, Klein also kept the gold to make the sculpture series Monogolds.

Sheet Theartnewspaper In the last three years of his life, Yves Klein sold nine pieces of invisible art. Three buyers chose to perform the ceremony, the rest chose to keep the receipt, including Jacques Kugel. According to the auction house, Klein has a notebook that records all transactions.

Guillaume Mallecot, Sotheby’s head of contemporary art in France, called the artist’s sale of the invisible work a milestone in 20th-century art history.

Sotheby’s identifies Yves Klein’s invisible work as an NFT – immaterial works of art represented by a certificate of ownership. The artist keeps a log of transactions similar to today’s blockchain technology. As a result, the auction house allows buyers to pay with cryptocurrency, instead of fiat as usual.

Before selling invisible artwork, in April 1958, Yves Klein shocked when he held an exhibition Le Vide at Iris Clert’s gallery in Paris. More than 3,000 visitors had to pay and line up to be ushered into an empty, whitewashed room. Yves Klein explains: “The exhibition is not empty but is filled with visual sensations in a pure state”.

Yves Klein was born in 1928 in France, in a family of painters and parents. Klein did not attend formal school but was exposed to many different art schools by his parents since childhood. He was a key figure in the nouveau réalisme (new realism) movement, which used art to subvert the viewer’s perception of reality. He published a book Yves Peintures (1954), Dimanche (1960). The painter died in 1962, at the age of 34, from a heart attack.

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