Francesco Clemente

Francesco Clemente (born March 23, 1952, Naples, Italy) is an Italian painter and draftsman whose dramatic figural imagery was a major component in the revitalization of Italian art beginning in the 1980s.

Clemente moved to Rome in 1970 to study architecture at the University of Rome and soon started working as a visual artist. His intense and expressive portrayals of the human body—sometimes his own—have a stark and moody quality that helped define what critics came to call Neo-Expressionism, a movement away from the intellectualization and abstraction that had characterized much of European and American painting of the 1970s. Bold and confrontational, often with sexual content and allegorical aspirations, Clemente’s work—together with that of artists such as Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, and Sandro Chia—fed a renewal of international interest in European art during the 1980s. Although his imagery was representational enough to be always identifiable, Clemente combined elements in poetic and ambiguous ways. He was an inveterate traveler—maintaining residences in Rome; New York City; Taos, New Mexico, U.S.; and Chennai (Madras), India—and he traveled regularly to each. His explorations of the cultures of those places and others lent him a rich trove of allusive imagery that was at once suggestive and mystical. His fascination with Hinduism also gave him an unusual perspective on European cultural traditions.

Clemente often worked in large cycles or series, and in one such series, Francesco Clemente Pinxit (1981), he collaborated with Indian artists trained in miniature painting traditions on a series of 24 works that combined indigenous Indian imagery with more-contemporary subject matter. He also worked collaboratively with other artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol and worked with or created images to accompany the texts of modern poets such as Gregory Corso, Robert Creeley, and Allen Ginsberg.

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Clemente also produced works for unlikely places, including a number of murals for the Palladium nightclub (1985, demolished), New York City, and some 200 paintings for Alfonso Cuarón’s film Great Expectations (1998). Retrospectives of his work were organized at the Sezon Museum of Art (1994), Tokyo; the Guggenheim Museum (1999), New York City; the Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli (2002–03), Italy; the Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2004); and the Brant Foundation (2019), Greenwich, Connecticut.