TIPTOE x Klein Blue®
TIPTOE has partnered with the Yves Klein Archives to create an exclusive, limited collection of objects.
The bold meeting of art and design
Since its creation in 2015, TIPTOE has sought to make its mark on the history of French design by creating iconic pieces made to stand the test of time. A pioneer in environmental responsibility within the furniture industry, the brand made a name for itself by developing its innovative and bold clamp table leg system.
Year after year, the studio has designed, developed and produced objects while staying true to its guiding principle: the desire to be at the forefront of environmental and social responsibility, with products made 100% in Europe by SMEs with exceptional expertise, some of them in the founder’s family workshops in Haute-Savoie.
A major artist of the 20th century, Yves Klein bequeathed to history a now-legendary color-material: an ultramarine blue of incomparable intensity, which he considered “the most perfect expression of blue” and adopted as the vehicle for his quest for the immaterial and the infinite. This invention, which he would name “IKB” (International Klein Blue), characterizes many of his works, including his monochromes.
© Pierre Descargues
© Succession Yves Klein c/o ADAGP, Paris
The monochrome adventure
It was in 1953 that Yves Klein declared monochromy to be the fundamental concept of his painting. Driven by the idea of “freeing color from the prison of the line,” Yves Klein turned to monochromy because, for him, it was the only way of painting that made it possible to “see what the absolute had that was visible.” He decided to use color as a pure mode of expression.
“This sensation of total freedom in pure sensorial space exerted such a power of attraction on me that I painted monochrome surfaces in order to see, to see with my own eyes, what the absolute had that was visible.”
Yves Klein, excerpt from “The Overcoming of the Problematic of Art”, 1959
The TIPTOE x Klein Blue® collaboration
Vase: Margaux Keller collections
As part of our TIPTOE x Klein Blue collaboration, we worked hand in hand with the Yves Klein Archives, whose mission is to protect and promote the artist’s work, to formulate a blue faithful to the famous Yves Klein blue. We developed two formulas: one for wood and one for steel, ensuring that they are identical so the materials blend perfectly.
“Blue has no dimension; it is beyond dimension, whereas other colors have one. All colors evoke concrete associations of ideas. Blue, at most, recalls the sea and the sky, the most abstract things in tangible and visible nature.”
Yves Klein’s work, as well as his bold and free spirit, are a source of inspiration for the designers of the TIPTOE brand, who wanted to celebrate his legacy through this exclusive edition. The design studio has therefore dressed its iconic objects (the 75 cm table leg, the 43 cm table leg, the Brooklyn coffee table, the LOU stool and the SSD chair) in the famous Yves Klein blue.
“I did not like colors ground in oil. They seemed dead to me; what I liked above all were pure powdered pigments, as I often saw them at wholesale color merchants. They had an extraordinary brilliance and a life of their own, independent and autonomous. It was truly color in itself.”
The choice of materials and the crafting of the objects remain true to TIPTOE’s values. The pieces have been pad-printed and screen-printed in blue by its French partners. These are highly durable, high-quality artisanal manufacturing processes that we deeply value.
A limited and exclusive edition available from March 15 in store and on tiptoe.fr.