Galerie Arditti, Paris
Galerie de France, Paris
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1982

Tokyo, Fuji Television Gallery, Yves Klein, 1979, no. 21, illustrated
Paris, Galerie de France, Yves Klein Peintures de Feu 1961-1962, 2004, p. 45, no. 10, illustrated

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate. Condition: This work is in very good condition.
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With the dramatic traces of Yves Klein's momentous fire action burned into its golden surface, this spectacular fire painting F 130 encapsulates the artist's most experimental and daring creativity, as well as all the brilliantly innovative ideals that are familiar from the best moments of his oeuvre. It is an extremely beautiful exposition of the artist's undisputed genius and although his art remains crucially indefinable, this is a paragon of both Nouveau réalisme and Zero and crystallises the redefinition of painting and sculpture that occurred in the decades following the Second World War. During a performance in July 1961 at the Centre d'Essais du Gaz de France in Saint-Denis near Paris, a research facility owned by the French government that Klein had negotiated to work in for two days, here Klein pioneered the possibilities of scorching specially prepared, industrial-strength card from Sweden that was covered with magnesium and a cadmium-hydrate silicate, with a slightly magnetized surface that could only be melted using a blowtorch. While the industrial coke-gas blowtorch subsumed the surface in flame, Klein's friend the sculptor Alex Kosta, who was dressed as a fireman, sprayed the work with a fire hose to produce the lyrical drip-marks that are fixed on the surface.

The sheer force of the artwork gives physical form to intangible concepts and affords a wide array of intensely contemplative and emotional responses. With his Fire Paintings Klein realised those invisible concepts that had obsessed him throughout his career and which he had previously pursued through the irrepressible allure of the monochrome and the alchemical mystery of gold. With fire Klein arrived at a medium that was immaterial and essential: light and life itself. This realisation turned out to be the apogee of his spectacular and tragically brief career: "I want to record the imprint of man's emotionality on today's civilization, and then record the trace of what precisely was at the origin of this same civilization, that is the civilization of fire. All this because emptiness always was my main concern, and I remain convinced that, in the heart of emptiness, just like in the heart of man, there are burning fires to be found" (The artist's Chelsea Hotel Manifesto, New York, 1961, cited in: Jean Paul Ledeur, Yves Klein: Catalogue des editions et des sculptures editees,  Saint-Paul de Vence, 200, p. 192).