Francesco Clemente

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Francesco Clemente 1991 with self-portrait

Francesco Clemente (born March 23, 1952 in Naples ) is a contemporary Italian - American artist . Along with Sandro Chia , Enzo Cucchi and Mimmo Paladino, he is one of the main representatives of the post-modern Italian transavantgarde ( Italian: Transavantguardia ).

Life

After completing a humanist school education, Clemente moved to Rome in 1970 and studied architecture at the Università degli Studi di Roma there . His great interest was in painting from the 17th century. He learned to paint as an autodidact . In 1973 he traveled to India for the first time , a country he will visit more often throughout his life. In 1974 he met the actress Alba Primiceri, whom he later married, and in the same year he met the German art professor Joseph Beuys . He set up a studio in Madras , where he moved in 1977, but returned to Rome in 1979. Since 1981 he has been commuting between Italy and New York , where he met Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat and worked for some time with both artists.

Francesco Clemente has been an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 2002 . He lives and works in New York and Varanasi , India.

plant

Clemente is seen as a representative of the Italian transavant-garde. Clemente's works are often rooted in political utopia and express an anti-materialist stance. He switched from photography to drawing in the 1970s and anticipated a return to painting in the 1980s. Influenced by thinkers as diverse as Gregory Bateson, William Blake, Allen Ginsberg, and J Krishnamurti, the art of Francesco Clemente cannot be described with a single term or classified in one direction. His works, which often contain dreamlike, almost surreal elements, try to describe and classify words such as nomadic, cross-border, intellectual or geographical . His imagery changes from intense expressionistic color nuances to reduced earth and olive tones with archaic mysticism , in which he depicts fables with tragic-operesque motifs as well as ironic self-portraits and trivial everyday scenes. Some of the works are reminiscent of Paul Gauguin , whose influence is unmistakable. Clemente works more often on large-format handmade paper than on canvas. In the 1990s, Clemente's work dealt intensively with erotic imagery, inspired by the tantric traditions of India and Tibet, and uses the current preoccupation with identity and sexuality as an opportunity to ask questions about the nature of the self. In the 2000s, Clemente's work went through a darker and grotesque phase, only to return to bright colors and a quieter painting style in recent years. From the 1980s to the present day, by charting the intellectual and social life of New York through a large number of portraits, Clemente has helped revive a genre that until then seemed discredited.

Clemente Kunst has been exhibited internationally in solo and group exhibitions. In the 1990s, the Philadelphia Museum of Art , the Royal Academy of Arts in London, the Center Pompidou , Paris, and the Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo showed extensive retrospectives of Clemente's work. In the years 1999–2000 further exhibitions followed in the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum , New York and in the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. In the 2000s at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the Museo Madre, Naples and the Schirn Kunsthalle , Frankfurt. An exhibition of self-portraits along with Clemente's own version of the tarot cards was shown at the Uffizi , Florence, in 2011 .

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

For the film Great Expectations (Great Expectations) in 1998 with Ethan Hawke and Gwyneth Paltrow , he designed the images of the painter represented by Hawke.

On December 3, 2017, an asteroid was named after Clemente: (265924) Franceclemente .

exhibition

  • 2011: Francesco Clemente - Palimpsest , Schirn Kunsthalle , Frankfurt am Main; 40 works from 1978 to 2011
  • 2012: Ménage à trois - Warhol, Basquiat, Clemente, Kunsthalle Bonn
  • 2013: Tents , Blain Southern, Berlin, September 21–9 . November 2013

literature

  • Michael Auping: Francesco Clemente. John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in association with HN Abrams, New York 1985, ISBN 0-8109-0772-0 (English).
  • Francisco Calvo Seraller: (inlet): Guggenheim Museum Bilbao Collection. Guggenheim Bilbao 2009, ISBN 978-84-95216-61-8 .
  • Francesco Clemente. Denim portraits. English essay by Francesco Pellizi, Cologne 2002, ISBN 3-931354-24-5 .
  • Francesco Clemente, portraits. Self portraits. English essays by Jean-Christophe Ammann and Rene Ricard, Cologne 2002, ISBN 3-931354-23-7 .
  • From the Terreiro, English and Italian poems by Adam Zagajewski. Cologne 2008, ISBN 978-3-931354-39-8 .
  • Danilo Echer: Francesco Clemente - works on paper. Exhibition catalog of the Galleria d'Arte Moderna, Bologna and the Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf. Allemandi, Turin 1999. ISBN 3-926154-41-1 .
  • Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, Düsseldorf (ed.): Insights. The 20th century in the North Rhine-Westphalia Art Collection, Düsseldorf. Hatje Cantz Verlag, Ostfildern-Ruit 2000, ISBN 3-7757-0853-7 .
  • Schirn Kunsthalle: Francesco Clemente - Palimpsest. Verlag für Moderne Kunst, Nuremberg 2011, ISBN 978-3-86984-225-7 .

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Johanna Schmeller: "Painting is a tender process" In: WeltN24 , April 24, 2007 (interview).
personal data
SURNAME Clemente, Francesco
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian-American artist of the Italian transavant-garde
DATE OF BIRTH March 23, 1952
PLACE OF BIRTH Naples