Yves Klein — Sculptures For Sale

Yves Klein extended his investigation of International Klein Blue (IKB) beyond canvas and into three dimensions with a body of sculptural work that applied his patented pigment directly onto plaster casts of antique sculpture. Two of the best-known examples are Victoire de Samothrace and Venus d'Alexandrie, both dated 1962, the final year of Klein's life.

Victoire de Samothrace reworks the Winged Victory of Samothrace, the Hellenistic marble held in the Louvre since 1884 and celebrated for its billowing drapery and sense of forward motion. Klein took a plaster cast of the sculpture and coated it entirely in IKB, stripping away the original's carved detail beneath a single, saturated plane of colour so that form and pigment become inseparable. Venus d'Alexandrie applies the same method to a classical Venus figure, reducing an idealised female form to pure blue mass.

Both works belong to a wider group in which Klein appropriated existing sculptural forms as vehicles for IKB, arguing that colour itself, rather than the sculptor's hand, could carry the full expressive charge of a work. Smaller sculptures in the series, such as Petite Venus, pair the blue pigment with gold leaf on miniature classical forms, extending the same logic at an intimate scale.

Klein's blue sculptures have been included in major surveys of postwar European art, including the Centre Pompidou's Le Nouveau Réalisme exhibition in Paris. They remain among the clearest demonstrations of his conviction that a single, unmodulated colour could function as an entire artistic statement, regardless of the object it covered.