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Francesco Clemente
Anima nomade

23.11.2024__30.03.2025

Curated by Bartolomeo Pietromarchi
 

Exhibition promoted by Assessorato alla Cultura di Roma Capitale and Azienda Speciale Palaexpo, produced and organized by Azienda Speciale Palaexpo

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Francesco Clemente Anima nomade23 November 2024__30 March 2025
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Francesco Clemente. Anima nomade is the largest solo show dedicated to the artist ever staged in Italy for the importance of the works on display, ranging from his astonishing Tents produced between 2012 and 2014 to his series of large wall paintings realized on the museum's walls especially for the occasion.

The exhibition has been devised to resemble a large installation that seamlessly unfolds in the exhibition galleries on the first floor of Palazzo Esposizioni, comprising three groups of works: the six Tents, the twelve Flags and the wall painting cycle entitled Ocean of Stories.

The exhibition immerses visitors in the India and Oriental tradition that has always been a source of inspiration for Francesco Clemente, enveloping them in a fabric dense with iconographical references and the private, diary-like sensitivity of his works.

Born in Naples but a nomad by calling, strongly influenced by literature and poetry, Clemente is a fully-fledged poet with a vast vocabulary of symbolic and metaphorical images. His works are declined in an all-embracing aesthetic landscape, at once metaphysical and mystical, cadenced by the representation of self, often entangled with erotic references, always lyrical and emotional and always expressed through an all-encompassing sense of colour.

His tents, inspired by Upanishad and Buddhist philosophy, embody the spirit of a wandering existence and represent "shelters for nomads". Clemente describes them as "the result of many disparate threads that have become interwoven in my mind over the years" – the symbol of a wanderer's life chosen to escape a single, linear vision of history and to embrace a global geography. The tents, with their walls painted with luminous tempera colours, conjure up imaginary worlds and echo sacred sites such as the Mogao Caves, or Thousand Buddha Grottoes, in Dunhuang, China, or the Ajanta and Ellora Caves in India, spaces for meditation that have made a deep mark on the artist's cultural memory. Each tent – from the Angels's Tent to the Pepper Tent – is an interior world rich in symbols, memories and reflections stratified over time.

The twelve Flags facing each other, suspended aloft to form a corridor to be passed through, are painted on both sides: on one side they bear symbolic yet recognisable figures, on the other, enigmatic aphorisms embroidered in gold. Both sides appear to be individual works, polarities of paint and lettering yet which merge with one another in their separation, like light and shade.

And finally, the wall painting cycle entitled An Ocean of Stories, produced on site for the occasion, ideally opens and closes the exhibition, bringing together all the experiences in a slender, unbroken line that suggests an ongoing, circular narrative. Thus Clemente recreates an imaginary journey in which each element, from colour to line, reflects the essence of a wandering soul in endless movement.

photo by Luca Babini

Having crossed geographies, cultures and different modes of expression, Francesco Clemente embodies the figure of the wandering artist par excellence.
In the course of his career he has used oil painting, fresco, encaustic painting, pastel and watercolour, and devoted time and energy to sculpture. In the 1970s Clemente fostered the return to painting as a significant means of expression.
The artist, who has found inspiration in oriental philosophical, spiritual an aesthetic traditions, depicts in his works a fragmentary ego and figures constantly changing amid different worlds, the material and the spiritual, the male and the female, that aspire to forms of reconciliation.
Before establishing his studio in New York in 1980, Clemente lived in India, devoting his energy to the study of Sanskrit and Hindu and Buddhist literature in the library of the Theosophical Society in the city of Chennai.
In New York he has worked with poets such as Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, and with artists of the calibre of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. In conjunction with Raymond Foye, he established a publishing company named Hanuman Books and has also become a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
His work is on display in many prestigious museums throughout the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Gallery in London, the Kunstmuseum in Basel, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museums in Bilbao and New York, and the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Museum of Modern Art in New York. Clemente lives and works between New York and India.

To know more

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"Francesco Clemente. Anima nomade" catalogue

The exhibition is accompanied by a catalogue containing a vast iconographical apparatus and essays by the curator and by leading international thinkers.
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Exhibition booklet

Download the booklet in Pdf.

Activities and workshops

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educational

Me? A wanderer by nature
Animated tour of the exhibition for children aged 7 to 11
December 15 2024, January 19, February 16 2025, 11:00 am
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educational

Wandering
Animated tour of the exhibition for primary schools
From November 26 2024 to March 28 2025, Tuesday to Friday at 11:30 am
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