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Francesco Clemente December 11, 1999 - January 29, 2000 " The artist's job is to bring back the consciousness that nothing is really necessary, and that rational things, rational decisions and facts and events, are not any more necessary than imaginary things." - Francesco Clemente (in an interview with Rainer Crone, 1996) Francesco Clemente, one of the most recognized figures in contemporary art today, is currently the subject of a major retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in New York. Born in Naples in 1952, he briefly studied Architecture in Rome, but soon dedicated himself full-time to art making. Profoundly influenced by extensive travel in India and by his friendship with Arte Povera representative Alighiero Boetti, he went on to become a founding member of the Trans-avantgarde movement which emerged in Italy at the very end of the 1970s. At a time when the major centre of the art world had shifted to New York, this young group of artists (which also included Mimmo Paladino, Enzo Cucchi and Sandro Chia) called into question the sense of "progress" in Western art and advocated calling freely, not programmatically, on a wide variety of art historical and cultural references, emphasizing the non-hierarchical relationship of the appropriated sources or imagery. Perhaps more than the other trans-avantgarde artists, Clemente has remained almost constantly in the public eye, particularly since his move to New York in 1982 where he has become somewhat of an art star. Shortly after his move there, he remarked on the "thin-ness" of the foundations of American society which he found to be in sharp contrast to his native Italy, and which may have been liberating, given his approach to artistic production. Early on, he expressed his concern that "modern art had become a formal device" and his belief that the artist must be "faithful to the spirit, to feeling"; a belief that is reflected in the wide variety of media he has worked with throughout his career, from painting, drawing and printmaking, to fresco and mosaic. Constant in all of his work is an imagery characterized by a startling, dreamlike quality, evocative of a strange, fluctuating or personal mythology. One critic has claimed that he "exploits figurative images for non-narrative purposes." While this may be true, Clemente, as an artist, is also about style and in his own words "style is the weight of what you are." The artist now divides his time between studios in New York, Madras, and Rome. Gallery hours: Tuesday - Saturday 11:00 - 5:00 |