francesco clemente

Career: four decades

1970s

After an early academic background in classical languages and literature, Clemente briefly enrolled as an architectural student at the University of Rome (in 1970). Through out the 1970s he exhibited drawings, altered photographs and conceptual works, mostly in Turin, Amsterdam and Cologne. He first travelled to India in 1973 and the following year trekked through Afghanistan with mentor and fellow artistic Alighiero Boetti. Clemente returned to India with his wife Alba in 1977, and for a period of two years lived and worked in Madras, where he made drawings, pastels and hand-made books. In 1980, Clemente's work was included in the Venice Biennale.

1980s

In 1981, he settled permanently in New York City. During the decade of the 1980s Clemente was featured in shows at numerous international venues including the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1983; the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, 1984 ; the Nationale galerie, Berlin, 1984; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 1985 ; the Art Institute of Chicago, 1987 ; the Fundacion Caja, 1987; and the Dia Center for the Arts, New York, 1988.

1990s

Through the 1990s, surveys of Clemente's work were exhibited by the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Royal Academy of Arts, London, the Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris and the Sezon Museum, Tokyo.

2000 and after

In 1999/2000, the Salomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York organized a major retrospective of Clemente’s work. He has participated in numerous collaborative projects, painting with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol and illuminating poetry by Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and René Ricard. With reference to recent pop culture, Francesco Clemente did the paintings that are seen in the film Great Expectations.