Francesco Clemente
Photo by Norbert Miguletz
Francesco Clemente
Two painters, 1980
Tempera on handmade paper, joined by cotton strips
172,7 x 239 cm.
Collection Hermes Trust, UK Courtesy Francesco Pellizzi
© Francesco Clemente
Photography: © Steven Sloman
Francesco Clemente. ‘Palimpsest’ in Frankfurt Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt presents the first comprehensive exhibition in Germany devoted to Francesco Clemente, an Italian artist whose works are often charged with eroticism, but also with a profound religious quality. June 8 – September 4, 2011]]>
Source: Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt / theartwolf.com
Born in 1952 in Naples, Italy, Francesco Clemente has developed an original pictorial language that draws on a large variety of symbols, myths, cultures, and philosophies. The exhibition, the first ever devoted to Clemente in Germany, features over forty works made between 1978 and 2011, including paintings, drawings and watercolors.
Clemente’s interest in philosophy and spirituality led him to travel to India when he was just 21, spending half of the 1970s in the southern city of Madras. Then, in 1980, he visited New York and began to collaborate with writers such as Allen Ginsberg or Robert Creeley, and with artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat or Andy Warhol, becoming a well known figure in the art world. He exhibited at the Venice Biennal in 1988, 1993 and 1995.
“Francesco Clemente. Palimpsest” is divided into three gallery spaces. The first section is devoted to “A History of the Heart in Three Rainbows” (2009), a set of three monumental watercolors, each measuring over 18 meters long. The second section features “a series of large, semi-abstract photographic images transformed into a kind of ‘wallpaper'”, as the Schirn Kunsthalle explains in a press note. The last section includes some 30 of Clemente’s most important works from 1978 to 2011, including “Two Painters” (1980) and “Self Portrait in an Imperial Age” (2005).
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