Francesco Clemente

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Francesco Clemente (born in Naples March 23, 1952) is an Italian-born contemporary artist. His work is influenced by thinkers as diverse as Gregory Bateson, William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, and J Krishnamurti. Dividing his time between New York and Varanasi, India, Clemente has adopted for his paintings a vast variety of supports and mediums, exploring, discarding, and returning to oil paint, watercolor, pastel, and printmaking. His work develops in a non-linear mode, expanding and contracting in a fragmentary way, not defined by a style, but rather by his recording of the fluctuations of the self.

Career

Water and Wine, gouache on paper, 1981,
Art Gallery of New South Wales)

Francesco Clementes peper tent at kochi muziris bienelle2014

Clemente's work spans four decades. His work is stylistically varied, inclusive, erotic, and nomadic. It embraces diverse mediums and diverse cultures as well, aiming at finding wholeness through fragmentation and witnessing the survival of contemplation and pleasure in our mechanical age.

Clemente's work is rooted in political utopia and expresses an anti-materialistic stance. In the 1970s he moved from photography to drawing and anticipated the return to painting of the 1980s.

His work is also nomadic. In the 1980s he divided his time between India and New York. While briefly associated with Neo-Expressionism he took an interest in collaborative works both with Indian craftsmen and with painters like Basquiat and Warhol, and poets like Robert Creeley and Ginsberg in New York. In an interview with The Brooklyn Rail, Clemente commented "these poets had been looking at the East for inspiration and I was also anxious to evade the materialism of the West."^[1]

In the 1990s Clemente explored intensely erotic imagery, inspired by the Tantra traditions both of India and Tibet, and turning contemporary preoccupations with identity and sexuality into an occasion to ask questions about the nature of the self. In the 2000s Clemente underwent a darker and grotesque phase, returning in recent years to luminous images of repose and transformation.

Since the 1980s until today, Clemente has also chronicled New York intellectual and social life through a great number of portraits, contributing to the revival of a genre until then somehow discredited.

Clemente's art has been presented in solo and group shows internationally. Major retrospectives have been held in the 1990s at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, at The Royal Academy in London, at the Centre Pompidou, Paris and at the Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo. Clemente's art was also featured in 1999-2000 at the Solomon R Guggenheim Museum, New York, and at the Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao. In the 2000s retrospectives were held at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, at the Museo MADRE, Naples and at the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt. An exhibition of self-portraits and of Clemente's own version of the Tarot Cards was held at the Uffizi Gallery, Florence in 2011.

The artist is currently represented by Bruno Bischofberger in Switzerland, BlainSouthern in London, and Mary Boone Gallery in New York.

Clemente's work is featured in the 1998 movie, Great Expectations.

Francesco Clemente is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Timeline

1980s

Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1983; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1984 ; the Nationale Galerie, Berlin, 1984; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1985 ; the Art Institute of Chicago, 1987; the Fundacion Caja, 1987; and the Dia Art Foundation, New York, 1988.

1990s

Philadelphia Museum of Art,^[2] the Royal Academy of Arts, London, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Sezon Museum, Tokyo.

2000 and after

Major retrospective 1999/2000, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and in Bilbao; Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2004); the Rose Art Museum, Massachusetts (2004); Museo Maxxi, Rome (2006), Museo Madre, Naples (2009), Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt (2011), Uffizi Gallery, Florence (2011) and Yale University (2013).

Recent exhibitions

The Tarot, Francesco Clemente at the Uffizi, unofficial guide and blog, September 8th - November 6th, 2011
Palimpsest, Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt June 8th - September 4th, 2011
JK's Walk, Galeria Javier Lopez - Mario Sequeira, Madrid,October 27th - February 3rd, 2012
Winter Women, Summer Self, Galeria Lorcan Oneill, Rome May 27th - July 30th, 2011
Ménage à Trois - Warhol, Basquiat, Clemente, Federal Art and Exhibition Hall, Bonn, Germany, February 10th - May 20th, 2012
Francesco Clemente: Inspired by India, Rubin Museum of Art, New York City, September 5, 2014 - February 2, 2015

Works

A History of the Heart in Three Rainbows^[3]
Bestiary
Map Of What Is Effortless- 1978 Gouache on paper 60 x 57 in 152.4 x 144.8 cm
Inside Outside
Sun
Atlas
Fire
Abbraccio
From Story of my life
Scissors and Butterflies

Francesco Clemente

Career

Timeline

1980s

1990s

2000 and after

Recent exhibitions

Works

Further reading

Books

Online articles

Interviews