Francesco Clemente - Lévy Gorvy
  • Installation view of Francesco Clemente's Pastels exhibition at Lévy Gorvy London, 2020

    Installation view, Francesco Clemente: Pastels, Lévy Gorvy, London, 2019. Photo: Stephen White

Francesco Clemente

Francesco Clemente

Francesco Clemente’s nomadism inflects many aspects of his practice: The artist divides his time between New York, New Mexico, and India, drawing inspiration from the cultural histories of these places as well as from his native Italy. Likewise, he has traversed movements over the course of his four-decade career, having been linked to the Italian Transavanguardia group that emerged in the late 1970s as well as New York’s concurrent neo-expressionism. Both Clemente’s life and work have long been invested in fluidity and indeterminacy, and he has actively resisted participating in any social order. Informed by such diverse practices as Beat poetry, the Tantra traditions of India and Tibet, the ritualism of Joseph Beuys, and Greco-Roman art, Clemente has forged a singular career that seeks intercultural resonance. In works whose poetic intensity has found form in paintings, works on paper, frescoes, photography, book arts, and installations, he regularly turns to portraiture and self-portraiture, employing metaphor and symbolism to consider the nature of the self. Commingling references that are anatomical, botanical, art historical, and mythical, Clemente addresses various dualities that plague philosophy: mind and body, freedom and constraint, part and whole. He approaches painting as a process in which he must wait for his mind and materials to arrive at narrative order together.

 

In his youth, Clemente wrote poetry and studied classical literature and philosophy; he began painting at the age of twelve after seeing the work of Velázquez at the Museo del Prado in Madrid. In 1970, he embarked on the study of architecture at the Università degli Studi di Roma, La Sapienza, but he left before completing the program in order to dedicate himself to an art practice. He attributes this decision to an encounter with Luca Maria Patella’s 1968 film SKMP2, which casts a surreal light on performances by four Arte Povera artists, including Jannis Kounellis and the director himself. Though he emerged during the heyday of Arte Povera in Italy—and shared the movement’s frustration with the country’s political system and institutions—Clemente eschewed the group’s engagement with found objects and industrial materials. He focused instead on photography, collage, and representational drawing. He nevertheless befriended Arte Povera artist Alighiero Boetti, with whom he travelled to Afghanistan in 1974. Shortly thereafter, he began making the first works he considered to be art. For his first exhibition at Gian Enzo Sperone in Rome in 1974, he photographed his drawings, enlarging, assembling, and framing them. He would not exhibit the 1971–78 drawings themselves until 1982.

 

Clemente had visited India for the first time when he was nineteen, seeking answers to questions about identity, spirituality, and mortality. He returned in 1975 and studied Sanskrit, as well as Hindu and Buddhist literature, in the library of the Theosophical Society in Chennai. During this period, he established a serial practice, producing hundreds of works on paper informed by his collaborations with Indian papermakers, miniaturists, and sign painters. Over the course of the ’70s, Clemente developed the themes and forms that would recur throughout his career: the human body, sexuality, myth and spirituality, dreamscapes, and his own image.

 

Clemente participated in the 1980 Venice Biennale, for which he garnered international attention, and he was critically lauded as a leader of the “return to figuration.” The following March, he travelled from India to New York for his first solo exhibition in the United States, presented jointly at Sperone Westwater and Fisher Gallery. He brought with him a series of gouaches on large sheets of paper joined with handwoven cotton strips—transportable “canvases” which suited his peripatetic life. He soon relocated to downtown Manhattan and established a studio on Broadway, where he continues to work today. In the ’80s, Clemente participated in the cross-fertilization of the moment, collaborating with poets, dancers, musicians, and other painters, including Morton Feldman, Andy Warhol, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, and Rene Ricard. He made his first large-scale oil paintings, a series called The Fourteen Stations, in 1981–82, doubling down on the medium just as the “death of painting” was announced by Douglas Crimp, and he presented them at Whitechapel Art Gallery in London in 1983. The following year, he collaborated with Warhol and Basquiat on a group of works and simultaneously developed book projects, including three works with Ginsberg. Such collaborations contributed to an ethos art historian Pamela Kort has identified: “Clemente’s art advocates experience, not theory. It argues for the need for a break with one’s engrained notions of Self, rather than a break with past aesthetic traditions.”

 

In 1982, art critic and editor Raymond Foye invited Clemente to produce a series of lithographs to illustrate a book of his choice, and he selected Alberto Savinio’s wartime diary from 1917, The Departure of the Argonaut. The resulting forty-eight prints, which Clemente described as “coincidences between word and image,” were exhibited at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, in 1986. That year, Clemente and Foye founded the imprint Hanuman Books, which through 1993 published books whose format was inspired by Indian prayer books; each was dedicated to an obscure work in translation or to the writings of a contemporary poet or artist.

 

In the spring of 1985, three exhibitions dedicated to Clemente were mounted simultaneously in New York at Sperone Westwater Gallery, Leo Castelli Gallery, and Mary Boone Gallery. In the New York Times, critic John Russell wrote, “These three exhibitions prove that it is possible to be consistently touching, stimulating, and provocative while remaining unemphatic throughout.” Later that year, Michael Auping curated a travelling survey that debuted at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Sarasota, Florida, before it was presented at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis; the Dallas Museum of Art; the University Art Museum at UC Berkeley; the Albright-Knox Art Gallery in Buffalo; and the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. In 1985, Clemente also completed a mural for the iconic, now-demolished Palladium nightclub in New York.

 

Clemente returned to Italy and India regularly, and traveled throughout the globe to the Caribbean, Egypt, Japan, Brazil, and the American Southwest. During a 1995 trip to Mount Abu in the Himalayas, Clemente painted a watercolor each day for fifty-one days. In 1996, he painted the seventeen large-scale and site-specific paintings that comprise La Stanza della Madre (Mother’s Room), commissioned by the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. In 1998, he collaborated with filmmaker Alfonso Cuarón, creating the portraits that were featured in the film Great Expectations. The following year, a major retrospective dedicated to Clemente’s work opened at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, travelling to the Guggenheim Bilbao in 2000. Major retrospectives of Clemente’s work have also been held at the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1990); the Royal Academy of Arts, London (1991); Centre Pompidou, Paris (1994); Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo (1994); Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2004); Museo d’Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina (MADRE), Naples (2009); Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt (2011); and the Rubin Museum of Art, New York (2014).

 

Clemente’s recent work includes Encampment, a 30,000-square-foot installation presented at MASS MoCA in North Adams, Massachusetts, in 2015–16. The work includes six painted and embroidered tents fabricated in collaboration with artisans in Rajasthan, India. In 2016, he painted a monumental mural at the Springs Center of Art in Beijing titled The Tide of the Ocean of Stories, inspired by the 11th-century collection of Indian stories recounted by Hindu poet Somadeva. In 2018, he completed a new body of paintings dedicated to Federico García Lorca’s Poet in New York, a collection of poems written by the Spanish author while living in New York in 1929–30.

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Video

Francesco Clemente | A Story Well Told I I–XXI, 2013

August 17, 2020

Exhibitions

Museum Exhibitions

Selected Press

Les Echos | LGDR, le nouveau « family office » de l'art contemporain

March 29, 2022

Francesco Clemente’s nomadism inflects many aspects of his practice: The artist divides his time between …

Judith Benhamou Reports | Levy, Gorvy, Dayan, Rohatyn (LGDR): the new global consortium of the contemporary art market

March 29, 2022

Francesco Clemente’s nomadism inflects many aspects of his practice: The artist divides his time between …

exibart | La super galleria LGDR inaugura a Parigi, con Francesco Clemente

March 29, 2022

Francesco Clemente’s nomadism inflects many aspects of his practice: The artist divides his time between …

Monopol | Die Zeichen stehen auf Sinnlichkeit

May 30, 2021

In der Lévy Gorvy Galerie fragte der Mitarbeiter am Schreibtisch die Besucherinnen, wie sie die Blumengemälde …

Les Echos | Les peintures de Francesco Clemente pendant le confinement

November 25, 2020

Les années ont passé et Clemente est un artiste qui sans le faire exprès s'inscrit aujourd'hui parfaitement …

Weixin | 厉为阁纽约新展,意大利"超前卫"大师弗朗切斯科‧克莱门特与游牧文化

October 18, 2020

Last month, Lévy Gorvy's exhibition "Francesco Clemente: Watercolors" (Francesco Clemente: Watercolors) …

Curbed | Two Legendary NYC Artists in Their Once-Bohemian Village Garden

September 28, 2020

Painters Pat Steir and Francesco Clemente spent the pandemic painting and chatting with one another across …

The Talks | Francesco Clemente: “Making Art Is to Time-Travel”

August 12, 2020

Francesco Clemente's new exhibition, Watercolors, opens on Monday 17 August at Lévy Gorvy in New York …

Galerie Magazine | Francesco Clemente’s New Watercolors Offer a Seaside Escape During Quarantine

May 22, 2020

Francesco Clemente, the Naples-born, longtime New Yorker, is known for his poetic paintings that sit …

Robb Report | ‘I Dream to Travel’: Artist Francesco Clemente Conjures the Sea From His New York City House

May 19, 2020

The New York-based painter on isolation, the "chaos of the self" and and his new online exhibition at …

Ocula | This Week: Francesco Clemente, Mystical Trees, and the IFPDA Print Fair

May 12, 2020

Francesco Clemente’s nomadism inflects many aspects of his practice: The artist divides his time between …

LUX Responsible Luxury Magazine | Some of the world’s greatest artists photographed in lockdown by Maryam Eisler

May 3, 2020

Francesco Clemente included in an article about Maryam Eisler's online exhibition, "Confined Artists …

The Glass Magazine | Glass encounters Francesco Clemente: Pastels at Levy Gorvy, London

January 30, 2020

"Francesco Clemente: Pastels" is a long-anticipated survey of the New York-based artist’s forty-year …

ArtDaily | Lévy Gorvy opens a retrospective of Francesco Clemente's pastels

January 23, 2020

Article on Francesco Clemente at Lévy Gorvy London.

GalleriesNow | Francesco Clemente: Pastels

January 23, 2020

Article on Francesco Clemente at Lévy Gorvy London.

Artlyst | Francesco Clemente: Pastels

January 23, 2020

Article on Francesco Clemente at Lévy Gorvy London.

CR Fashion Book | Contemporary Artist Francesco Clemente Debuts A Collection Of Creative Visions

December 17, 2019

The artist’s mythical Pastels exhibition opens at Lévy Gorvy Gallery in London

Financial Times | Critic's Choice: Francesco Clemente

December 14, 2019

Article on Francesco Clemente at Lévy Gorvy London.

Financial Times How To Spend It | Artist Francesco Clemente debuts at London’s Lévy Gorvy

December 13, 2019

An exhibition focusing on 40 years of Francesco Clemente's experiments with pastels—culminating in …

Art Collected | Francesco Clemente at Lévy Gorvy

December 8, 2019

Lévy Gorvy announces Francesco Clemente: Pastels, an exhibition illuminating Clemente’s extraordinary …

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