Francesco Clemente at The Brant Foundation

12 November 2018 to 1 April 2019

Solo exhibition Francesco Clemente: 1978-2018 at The Brant Foundation Art Study Center.

The Brant Foundation Art Study Center is pleased to announce a survey of works by Francesco Clemente, on view from November 12, 2018 through March 2019. The exhibition brings together a concise but comprehensive selection spanning 40 years of the artist’s work including self-portraits and portraits, works on paper, frescoes, monumental oil and watercolor paintings, and one of the artist’s notable hand painted tents. Executed in Rome, New York, Taos, Varanasi, Jodhpur, Orissa, Pondicherry, and Madras, the works have traveled far and been dispersed among museum collections and art patrons. They now come together for Francesco Clemente: Works 1978–2018, each with its own story to tell. Non-chronological in nature, the exhibition interweaves threads that have been a constant in Clemente’s long-spanning oeuvre, and presents ideas and questions that persist throughout his various transformations in medium.

“Ideas divide, forms unite. In the search for form painters encounter beauty. If they are lucky,” says Clemente.

Francesco Clemente is a contemporary artist known for exploring metaphysical questions of spirituality, mysticism, and the nature of the self. Often erotic, and at times violent in its subject matter, Clemente’s lyrical, emotional approach is expressed by his unique sense of color. Strongly influenced by literature and poetry, Clemente is a poet in his own right, with a vast lexicon of symbolic and metaphorical imagery that expands and transforms to tell an open-ended story...

Francesco Clemente in ARTFORUM

September 2018

Review by Ida Panicelli in ARTFORUM.

Accustomed to collaborating with poets and writers—among them Gregory Corso, Allen Ginsberg, Rene Ricard, and Salman Rushdie—Francesco Clemente allowed himself to be seduced by Poet in New York, the recently retranslated collection of poems that Frederico García Lorca wrote between 1929 and 1930 while a student at Columbia University. With a sort of foresight, Lorca saw the city as a merciless meat grinder that devours the most vulnerable, the destitute, and innocent children. His critique of the capitalist world led him to write of Wall Street: "There, as nowhere else, you feel a total absence of the spirit."

The poem from which Clemente has taken most of his paintings' titled, "El rey de Harlem" (The King of Harlem), overflows with grief like a funeral lament, yet also reflects the vital and creative energy of Harlem, where the poet's Mediterranean sensuality clashes with the harsher eroticism of New York...

Francesco Clemente at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale

23 October 2016 to 23 April 2017

Solo exhibition Francesco Clemente: Dormiveglia at NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale will present Francesco Clemente: Dormiveglia from October 23, 2016 through August 23, 2017. This exhibition includes a series of nine, majestic large-scale paintings by Francesco Clemente (born 1952 in Naples, Italy, lives and works in New York and India). Painted in New York in 1998, the Dormiveglia series takes its title from the Italian expression connoting the state between sleep and awakening and captures the state in which reality intrudes into the realm of dreams...

Francesco Clemente at Coro della Maddalena

15 September to 13 November 2016

Solo exhibition Francesco Clemente: After Omeros at Coro della Maddalena, Alba, Italy.

The partnership between the Ceretto family, well-known wine makers, and the municipality of Alba (CN) goes on. Like every year, beginning in September and for most of the duration of the International Alba White Truffle Fair, the Coro della Maddalena of Alba is hosting a contemporary art exhibition featuring the most prestigious names in the international art scene.

This year it will be up to Francesco Clemente to combine contemporary art with the wonderful Baroque setting of the Choir. The artist, who was protagonist at the Siena exhibition "Fiori d’Inverno a New York” (winter flowers in NY), will bring to Alba his most recent works which were never displayed in Italy before...

Francesco Clemente at Jablonka Maruani Mercier Gallery

8 September to 20 October 2016

Solo exhibition at Jablonka Maruani Mercier Gallery, Brussels, Belgium.

Jablonka Maruani Mercier Gallery is proud to present Francesco Clemente's body of work for the first time in Belgium. The exhibition will showcase three series : Fertility (painted in India), Portraits (painted in New York City), & Making Love in a Fleeting World (painted in St. Barts).

The oeuvre of the Italian contemporary artist Francesco Clemente (b. 1952) spans over four decades and has achieved international acclaim. Predominantly interested in themes of both religion and spirituality, Clemente's work for the most part depicts both the human form (in its entirety or metamorphosing between human and animal) or symbolic motifs...

Francesco Clemente at Springs Art Center

3 September to 31 October 2016

Solo exhibition A Nomadic Life: Francesco Clemente in China at Springs Art Center, Beijing, China.

Rather than just being a user of the concept, Clemente is a true nomad. His understanding of the nomadic life is thinking globally and acting locally. In the artist’s view, nomadic space is based on national space. He integrates a truly nomadic life into his art practice with the intention of expanding its vitality and adopts a “reproduction” which redefines cultural attributes. Clemente continues to use repetition and displacement in these ink paintings, executing the various figures in wonderful and meaningful renditions. Clemente adopts the somewhat satirical and humorous style of a monologue and his approach seems to unveil the ominous contemporary circumstances while the addition of a poetic, metaphysical tone expresses freedom of choice and has the appeal of an enigma...

Francesco Clemente at Carriageworks

30 July to 9 October 2016

Solo exhibition Francesco Clemente: Encampment at Carriageworks, Eveleigh, Australia.

The first major exhibition in Australia of work by acclaimed Italian contemporary artist Francesco Clemente, and second in the annual Schwartz Carriageworks series of major international visual arts projects, Encampment includes six of Clemente’s celebrated large-scale tents, transforming 30,000 square feet of the precinct into an opulent tented village.

Created in collaboration with a community of artists in Rajasthan, India, with exteriors that combine camouflaged fabric and golden embroidery, the tents in Encampment invite us into jewel-toned spaces populated by Byzantine angels...

Francesco Clemente at Complesso Museale Santa Maria della Scala

29 June to 2 October 2016

Solo exhibition Winter Flowers and the Tree of Life at Complesso Museale Santa Maria della Scala, Siena, Italy.

With this exhibition Francesco Clemente pays tribute to Siena, a city that already in 2012 has shown a keen interest in his art with the prestigious appointment to design the Great Banner of the Palio di Siena. As a result of this collaboration, the artist has created ten new works, divided into two distinct cycles, to be exhibited in the city at the invitation of Max Seidel...

Francesco Clemente at MASS MoCA

13 June 2015 to 3 January 2016

Solo exhibition Francesco Clemente: Encampment at MASS MoCA, North Adams, Massachusetts.

“I’m told I am a nomadic artist,” artist Francesco Clemente once dryly noted. In Encampment — a multi-part 30,000 square foot installation occupying MASS MoCA’s largest gallery — Clemente’s transitory experience of changing geographies, diverse cultural climates, and indeed consciousness itself infuses his imagery and art with a particularly rich range of references and meaning. For the past three decades Clemente has traveled often, dividing his work and primary residences between Varanasi, India, and New York. Informed by the logistical realities and production opportunities of making art in wildly disparate locations, his aesthetic investigation of states of flux delves into the nature of passage itself. “I believe in this movement of generating and dissolving, and regenerating and dissolving again — this is a technique for the mind to become and remain awake,” Clemente explains. Passages between bodily pleasure and changing spiritual states, between acts of destruction and creation, and between the seen and unseen are all at the heart of Encampment, opening at MASS MoCA in North Adams on June 13, 2015, and remaining on view through early January 2016...

Francesco Clemente in Harper’s Bazaar

April 2016

Article by Laura Brown Francesco Clemente: Model as Muse in Harper’s Bazaar.

Liya Kebede has been modeling for more than 20 years, but she had never before sat for an artist. It was a particular thrill to sit for Clemente. "I didn't know his work specifically, but when I found out that he had painted the portrait of Gwyneth Paltrow in [the 1998 film] Great Expectations, I was so excited," she says. "I remember when I watched that movie, the portrait really touched me. I don't know why. Then to suddenly see my portrait done in the same way, it meant a lot to me."...