Klein/Byars/Kapoor.

Three world stars can be seen together in Denmark for the first time when ARoS opens its doors to an exhibition of impressive works by Yves Klein, James Byars and Anish Kapoor.

The exhibition shows how three artists from different periods and in different media, through their work with colour and material, have written themselves into the history of art. For Klein, Byars and Kapoor, colour is given a spiritual dimension, and all three artists use a minimal expression where they manage to create an intense and complex experience with few means.

French artist Yves Klein became famous in the late 1940s when he brought new spatial and metaphysical dimensions to classical painting with his single-colour blue paintings. One of the ways he did this was by letting naked female bodies coloured in blue paint roll across his canvases. American artist James Lee Byars also let colour and material play a leading role in his chalk-white marble sculptures from the 1990s. The legacy of both Yves Klein and James Lee Byars lives on in art today, and they are particularly united in the works of Indian-born British artist Anish Kapoor. With his sculptural masses of red wax, Kapoor moves between painting and sculpture, and as Klein and Byars did, he manages to activate colour as an element that creates form, movement and space. Most recently, Anish Kapoor created the official symbol of the London Olympics, the Olympic tower, Orbit (2012).

The exhibition is organised in collaboration with MAMAC, Musée d'Art Moderne et d'Art Contemporain in Nice, which also previously collaborated with the museum on the exhibition Robert Rauschenberg On and off the Wall in 2004.

Warm up for the exhibition of portraits by Anish Kapoor from DR K in connection with his solo exhibition at the Royal Academy Gallery in London, where he was the first ever to have the entire gallery at his disposal.