22 june to 21 october 2012

 

The CCC’s summer exhibition is given over to Claude Lévêque who is a major figure in the French and international art worlds. For this exhibition the artist creates a large-scale installation taking up the entire gallery space. In contrast to this new spectacular work, which is at one and the same time dazzling and brutal, a more intimate piece of work will be shown. Inspired by childhood, the work was created over 30 years ago at the CCC. This conversation across time, examining two periods in the artist’s work, can also be viewed as a conversation about place. Similarly the Abbaye de Fontevraud will also bring together this summer a new large scale dreamlike work and a work from the artist’s early work.

 

Here at the CCC Claude Lévêque has created “The Atomic Age”. This new installation designed specifically for our gallery space at the Centre depicts the silent menace of a war about to explode. The artist has transformed the space into a retrenchment camp, ready for any declared or undeclared battles troubling today’s world more than ever before. The exhibition is both a super-protected impact zone and a highly dangerous area, hindering all movement. The piece takes visual and spatial saturation to its bursting point. The light here is stronger than ever, dazzling, as threatening as it is attractive.

 

Alongside as a counterpoint, we are showing ‘Anniversaire’ or Birthday, almost 30 years after its first showing at the CCC in the early 80s. This early piece created by Levêque shows another side to the work, borrowing from the world of childhood, which for the artist is a way to ‘keep the ability to wonder’.

 

* ‘ Anniversaire’ or Birthday (collection . FRAC Bourgogne) was created as part of the Biennale of Contemporary Art of Tours in 1983