Yves Klein sold ‘nothing’ for gold: how his empty ‘Zones’ still sell for millions

Between 1959 and his death in 1962, artist Yves Klein sold eight “Zones of Immaterial Pictorial Sensibility” — parcels of empty, non-existent space — in exchange for pure gold. Buyers received a receipt, and if they wanted the zone to be permanently and irreversibly theirs, they had to burn the receipt in a ritual on the banks of the Seine, while Klein threw half of their gold into the river in front of them.

In 2022, one of the surviving unburned receipts, for a zone originally purchased in 1959 for 20 grams of gold, sold at Sotheby’s for €1,063,500. Sotheby’s own marketing for the sale compared the lot to an NFT.

Klein’s early fame came from a single colour: a saturated, powdery ultramarine blue that he mixed himself, applied without a brush, and patented in 1960 as International Klein Blue. He sold canvases in that exact shade that were otherwise identical, differing only in size.

In 1958, Klein went further, emptying a Paris gallery completely, painting its walls white, and posting French Republican Guards outside the door. He called the show Le Vide, or The Void, and between two and three thousand people paid to see nothing at all.

Klein’s works, including the immaterial zones, continue to draw high prices at auction decades after his death, alongside other conceptual pieces that sell for large sums despite minimal physical material, such as Maurizio Cattelan’s Comedian, a banana taped to a wall that sold at Sotheby’s in November 2024 for $6.24 million.