Cy Twombly, Sunset (1957), Image Credit: Tom Powel Imaging / Courtesy Dominique Lévy, New York.

Twenty minutes of continuous, monotone sound, followed by twenty minutes of absolute silence; such is the premise for Yves Klein’s 1949 Monotone Symphony, a powerful piece considered to stand at the core of the artist’s pioneering conceptual ouevre and one that bore remarkable influence on fellow artists Cy Twombly and Lucio Fontana, each of which drove their own sense of dichotomous action on canvas and sculpture, defining the continued explorations of abstraction and concept in post-war art.

Yves Klein, Pluie Bleu (S 36) (1961), Image credit Tom Powel Imaging, © Yves Klein, Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York ADAGP, Paris 2013.

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The Wall Street Journal reports on the recent opening of Galerie Perrotin’s New York space, which shares the building at 909 Madison Avenue (a former Bank of New York branch) with Dominique Lévy Gallery.  With three spaces in Paris, and one in Hong Kong, Emmanuel Perrotin’s growing gallery network has finally found root in New York’s fertile art world. “For many artists around the world, their New York show is their most important,” He said.  It is, according to him,  “the dream of every ambitious gallerist, because within one kilometer of this gallery, you have more collectors than anywhere else in the world.” (more…)