Francesco Clemente: Pastels & Watercolors (Paris)

“The images present themselves quickly, in a rushed, hectic, vivid, urgent way. I make raw ink drawings to remember what I see, and then that becomes like a music score.”
- Francesco Clemente

After showing Francesco Clemente’s work at our Salzburg gallery in 2004 and 2007, we are very pleased to announce his first solo exhibition of works on paper.
Francesco Clemente is one of the most renowned international artists who revitalized figurative painting with the emergence of the Neo-Expressionist movement in the late 1970s early 80s. Clemente’s unique style combines the tradition of Indian imagery, the Romanticism of William Blake and of Italian Renaissance frescoes to make evocative and powerful works in a sensuous palette.

In this exhibition, the artist will present 21 new pastels and watercolors, all in the form of a puzzle piece, installed to create a mosaic of poetic, colorful figurative images, which do not necessarily reveal a whole picture. As in much of his work, Clemente makes references to non-Western symbols, myth and spirituality, astrology and the four elements, sexuality and senses, as well as dream-like visions.

Francesco Clemente was born in 1952 in Naples. From 1970 he studied architecture at the University of Rome, and began to exhibit his drawings, photographs and conceptual works in Europe. From 1973, he travelled regularly to India, and in 1981 he moved to New York. Since the mid-80s, Clemente's work has been the subject of many exhibitions: in the Berlin National Gallery (1984/85), Basel Museum of Contemporary Art (1987), Philadelphia Museum of Art (1990), Royal Academy of Arts, London (1991), Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris (1994/95), Guggenheim Museum, New York (1999/2000), Irish Museum of Modern Art, Dublin (2004), the National Archaeology Museum, Naples (2002/03) and the National Museum of XXIst Century Art, Rome (2006). A major exhibition of Clemente’s oeuvre is currently on view at the MADRE (Contemorary Art Museum DonnaRegina) in Naples, until 12 October 2009.