Yves Klein‘s ‚Untitled Shroud Anthropometry (ANT SU 30)‘ of 1960 will be offered in Grisebach‘s ‚Selected Works‘ sale on 26 November 2026 (EUR 2,000,000–3,000,000). It is one of the few ‚Anthropométries Suaires‘ still in private hands.
The work‘s provenance is remarkable. Klein dedicated it to the Swiss filmmaker Yvan Butler, who filmed his 1961 exhibition ‚Monochrome und Feuer‘ (Monochrome and Fire) at Museum Haus Lange in Krefeld. Its history thus leads directly into the Rhineland art scene of those years and the circle around the ZERO movement. In 1985 a private collection in North Rhine-Westphalia acquired the painting from Gallery 44 in Kaarst, near Düsseldorf. It has remained in that collection ever since.
Klein first presented his Anthropometries in public in 1960, the year this work was made. On 9 March, at the Galerie Internationale d‘Art Contemporain in Paris, three nude models covered their bodies in paint and, following his directions, left their imprints on sheets of paper. The event was accompanied by Klein‘s ‚Monotone-Silence Symphony‘: twenty minutes of a single sustained chord, followed by twenty minutes of silence. Klein called the models ‚living brushes‘. What interested him was not the image of the body, but its physical presence as the picture came into being.
‚Untitled Shroud Anthropometry (ANT SU 30)‘ belongs to a small group of some thirty known works that Pierre Restany, the critic and theorist of Nouveau Réalisme, called ‘Anthropométries Suaires‘. Unlike the Anthropometries staged before an audience, these ‚suaires‘ (the French word evokes a shroud) were not performed but made as contact prints.
The almost symmetrical form, in International Klein Blue (IKB), pink and black, shows an uneven layer of pigment, thin in places. The canvas was probably wrapped around parts of a body coated in paint and then opened out again. Folded, pressed and touched, the canvas both records the body‘s trace and helps to shape it. The body itself has gone, yet its past presence remains held in the canvas. This tension between presence and absence, body and immateriality, lies at the heart of Klein‘s work.
Untitled Shroud Anthropometry, (ANT SU 30) by Yves Klein will be shown in:
20 to 24 October Special Preview in Paris
GRISEBACH Pied-à-terre, 25 rue des Filles du Calvaire, 75003 Paris
27 and 28 October in Munich
GRISEBACH, Türkenstrasse 104, 80799 Munich
30 and 31 October in Frankfurt
GRISEBACH X GALERIE ANITA BECKERS, Braubachstraße 9, 60311 Frankfurt am Main
3 and 4 November in Hamburg
GRISEBACH X JB FINEARTS, Tesdorpfstraße 21, 20148 Hamburg
7 and 8 November in Zurich
GRISEBACH X GALERIE HAAS, Rämistrasse 35, 8001 Zurich
11 and 12 November in Düsseldorf
GRISEBACH, Bilker Strasse 4–6, 40213 Düsseldorf
19 to 25 November in Berlin
GRISEBACH, Fasanenstrasse 25, 10719 Berlin
Auction Selected Works on 26 November, 6pm