Claude Lévêque

Claude Lévêque (1953) has been developing, since the 1980s, works of art notably marked by the culture of the punk movement. Refusing any categorisation, his creations often take the shape of environments in which objects, light and sound combine to create dense atmospheres. With Sans Titre (La Fontaine d’argent, le Château d’eau, le Chemin de fer), Sans Titre (Arbeit macht frei) and Sans Titre, Mudam possesses three works of art which exemplify the development of his artistic practice.

The provocative juxtaposition of two emblematic symbols from the 20th century in Sans Titre (Arbeit macht frei) underlines the hatred that Lévêque has for all forms of ideology. The combination of the sadly famous sentence “Arbeit macht frei”, borrowed from the entrance gate of the Auschwitz concentration camp, with the character of Mickey, created in white neon from a children’s drawing, offers a collision between two visions of the world, worked with brutality, and without straying from punk: they exclude, a priori, one from the other, like black and white, but are they not, in fact, linked?