Clemente educated himself in the library of the Theosophical Society in Chennai, formerly Madras. There he studied Sanskrit and became acquainted with Hindu and Buddhist literature. He was fascinated with the local culture and craftsmanship, learning from and working together with Indian papermakers, miniature painters and sign painters.  During this time, Clemente created hundreds of works on paper in various sizes, and established his practice of working in series.  One such series included in the Brant Foundation exhibition is the Pondicherry Pastels, a group of 82 small works on paper depicting his inner and outer life in the Aurobindo Ashram. For another series, Passports, Clemente painted on a monumental scale, gluing together several pieces of handmade Pondicherry paper with handwoven Khadi cotton strips to create billboard-sized works with vibrant representations of subject matter inspired by eastern cosmologies, particularly Samkya enumerations of the five senses, the five elements, planets and functions of the body. He would fold and carry the enormous works by hand on his flights back from India.

In the early 80’s, Clemente was initially considered a part of the Transavanguardia movement in Italy and of Neo- Expressionism in New York. Artists like Julian Schnabel, Anselm Kiefer, Enzo Cucchi and Jean Michel Basquiat were known for a ‘return to figuration’, moving away from the minimalist and conceptual modes of work dominant at the time, in exchange for painting and expressive symbolic imagery.

Today Clemente is reluctant to be linked to any specific artistic movement, and though he credits his closeness to many artists for their contribution to his development, Clemente would rather see himself as a nomadic artist. He is fascinated by the continuous exchange between the East and West, particularly between America and India, an exchange which goes as far back as the 19^th century when Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau read the Bhagavad Gita.

In 1981, Francesco Clemente travelled to New York from India for his exhibition at Sperone Westwater and Fisher Gallery. After witnessing the creative drive of the city, he soon relocated to New York with his wife and two daughters, and established a studio in a then deserted street in downtown Manhattan, where he works to this day.

New York City in the 1980’s proved to have a profound impact on Clemente’s artistic life. He collaborated with and befriended a wide range of dancers, poets and painters in the city’s thriving art and literary scene. He worked on a series of collaborative paintings with Andy Warhol and Jean- Michel Basquiat, and created illuminated manuscripts with poets Allen Ginsberg, Robert Creeley, John Weiners, and Rene Ricard. He had met the poets, idols of his teenage years, through Raymond Foye, with whom he later published the Hanuman Books. He began painting in oil on a large scale, and created a group of works titled Fourteen Stations, which was shown by Nick Serota at the Whitechapel Gallery in London in 1983. He continued to return to India on a regular basis, producing defining works such as the Red Book and the White Book, watercolors that celebrate the female power and the Black Book, a group of extreme erotic images inspired by the Temple Sculptures in Konarak.

In the spring of 1985, Clemente had three simultaneous gallery shows in New York at Sperone Westwater Gallery, Leo Castelli Gallery, and Mary Boone Gallery. Also that year, Michael Auping curated an exhibition of Francesco Clemente at the John and Mable Ringling Museum of Art in Florida, which travelled to 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 ended with the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles in 1987. He also exhibited his work at the Institute of Contemporary Art in Boston in 1984, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1985, the Art Institute of Chicago in 1987, and Dia Art Foundation in 1988, among others. Clemente exhibited internationally at the National Galerie Berlin in 1984, which later traveled to Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam and other venues in Germany.  In 1990, his exhibition Three Worlds opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, continuing to Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut, San Francisco Museum of Modern Art and the Royal Academy of Arts in in London in 1991.

Clemente chronicled the many fascinating personalities he met during this time through portraiture, achieving a unique and distinct style of rendering faces that he became well recognized for. The popularity of his portraits lead to Clemente’s participation in the film Great Expectations, directed by Alfonso Cuaron in 1998. The artist created more than one hundred works on paper and portraits on canvas of actors that were a critical element in the storyline.

The following year, Francesco had a major retrospective at the Guggenheim museum in New York curated by Lisa Dennison and Tom Krens, which travelled to Guggenheim Bilbao in 2000.  Notable exhibitions in the 2000’s included the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, at the Museo MADRE, Naples and the Schirn Kunsthalle, Frankfurt. An exhibition of self-portraits and Clemente’s watercolor version of the Tarot deck was held at the Uffizi Gallery, Florence in 2011. The Uffizi acquired and exhibits a self-portrait in the Vasari Corridor.

Clemente has worked in a wide range of mediums, including watercolor, pastel, oil, fresco, tempera, charcoal, sculpture, in a great variety of sizes and formats.

Clemente’s has returned to self-portraiture throughout his life. The artist has portrayed himself as an ageless presence, at times twisted in difficult and improbable positions, at other times sitting in peaceful and meditative ones.  He states that the self-portraits are a meditation on the Buddhist notion of the self as ‘continuity of discontinuity’.

Clemente delights in depicting the grotesque as sublime, and the sublime as grotesque. The two values are interchangeable in his visual language.  His graphic depictions of sexuality, violence, explicit male and female figures, and bodily functions are executed vividly, without judgment, and in a spirit of celebration. These depictions are intended to witness the essential harmony and the transcendent nature of reality. Clemente claims that to the eye of a painter, the world is perfect.

Clemente’s most recent work includes a series of oil on canvas paintings featuring broken hearts and white flags, a series of black flags against a blue sky (painted on the eve of the last presidential election), a series of enormous murals made in Beijing, and an elegiac group of paintings inspired by the poetry of Federico Garcia Lorca in New York. He continues to collaborate with Indian miniature painters every year, creating sets of intricate and exquisite watercolors.

In 2015, Clemente exhibited a group of six painted and embroidered tents, along with watercolors and sculpture, at Mass MoCA. The tents, 12 feet by 18 feet, were fabricated in India with local tentmakers, and the inside walls and ceilings were painted by Clemente. Each tent is an inhabitable painting, which may be entered and experienced in the way of a contemporary chapel. The exhibition later went to Carriageworks, Sydney, Australia, and the tents have been shown separately in Berlin and New York.

Francesco Clemente’s exhibition at the Brant Foundation is a concise but exhaustive retrospective that will feature his work from 1978 until 2018, marking 40 years of the artist’s life. The show is non- chronological, weaving together threads that have been a constant in Clemente’s long-spanning oeuvre, and presenting ideas and questions that persist for the artist throughout various transformations in medium. The exhibition includes self-portraits, portraits, multiple series of work on paper in watercolor and pastel, frescoes, several monumental oil paintings, and one tent. Executed in Rome, Varanasi, Jodhpur, Orissa, Pondicherry, Madras, New York, and Taos over the last four decades, the works have travelled far and been dispersed among museum collections and art patrons who have been a part of Clemente’s history. They now return for Francesco Clemente: 1978- 2018, each work with its own story to tell.

Francesco Clemente at The Brant Foundation:

Remembering Henry’s Show Exhibition Page

Remembering Henry’s Show Exhibition Catalogue