Echoing Yves Klein’s famous Chelsea Hotel Manifesto, the series Because They Tried to Bore Holes in My Greatest and Most Beautiful Work revolves around mind-body, surface-depth and natural-synthetic dialectics, challenging the notion of subjectivity and materiality in the digital era. Its title refers to a story the French artist told about his first monochrome. As a teenager lying on a beach in Nice, Klein felt hatred for the birds flying overhead in the Mediterranean sky, trying to “bore holes in [his] greatest and most beautiful work”: the sky itself.

Rosenkranz shifts the metaphysics of the unique colour that is International Klein Blue towards an insurmountable materiality, choosing to print images of those monochromes off the internet. Trivialised by being digital reproductions, these prints are enlarged to human size and glued directly onto plexiglas supports. This manipulation leaves visible traces on their surface, presenting a body that is creased and almost scarred after its manipulations. If these marks are liable to recall the corporeal forms Klein used in his Anthropometries , they certainly force the viewer to become aware of the image’s materiality—its skin, its colour, its reflections—to the detriment of the questions of sublimity and transcendency that are closely linked to works of art.