Francesco Clemente

Francesco Clemente was born in Naples, Italy, on March 23, 1952. He relocated to Rome in 1970 and enrolled in architecture at the Università degli Studi di Roma 'La Sapienza,' though he left without completing a degree — a trajectory that speaks to the restless, self-directed intelligence that would come to define his practice. Over the following decades he established a peripatetic studio life divided among New York, India, and New Mexico, a geographic dispersal that is not incidental but constitutive of his art: the movement between cultures, mythologies, and bodily experiences has remained the animating condition of his work.

Clemente emerged as a significant figure in the international art world during the early 1980s, with solo exhibitions at Mary Boone Gallery in New York and Galerie Bruno Bischofberger in Zürich marking his entry into major institutional and commercial circuits. His importance as a works-on-paper artist was confirmed decisively by Three Worlds, a body of watercolors, pastels, gouaches, folding screens, and artist's books presented at the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1990 and subsequently at the Royal Academy of Arts in London in 1991. These works demonstrated that watercolor could carry the full psychological and symbolic weight of a major pictorial statement. The scope of his achievement was surveyed most comprehensively in a retrospective at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York in 1999, which brought together more than two hundred paintings, watercolors, drawings, and other works spanning from the early 1970s onward and traveled to Bilbao. Further retrospectives followed at the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin, the Schirn Kunsthalle Frankfurt, the Madre – Museo d'Arte Contemporanea Donnaregina in Naples, and the Rubin Museum of Art in New York, tracing a sustained institutional engagement across four decades.

His work is held in the permanent collections of the Museum of Modern Art and the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Kunstmuseum Basel, Tate in London, and the Centre Pompidou in Paris, among others. In recent years Clemente has continued to exhibit widely: solo presentations have appeared at venues including Vito Schnabel Gallery in New York — his primary gallery — as well as Lévy Gorvy Dayan in New York, LGDR in Paris and Hong Kong, Palazzo Esposizioni in Rome, and Château La Coste in Provence. Works from the 2024 exhibition Summer Love in the Fall at Lévy Gorvy Dayan were reviewed in The Brooklyn Rail, and features in ArtCritic and CURA. magazine in 2025 reflected continued critical attention. A major retrospective, Francesco Clemente: In Between, presenting approximately seventy works spanning more than five decades, is scheduled at Triennale Milano from May 29 to September 6, 2026, curated by Francesca Pietropaolo with Robert Storr.