Francesco Clemente
Southern Cross, 2006
Oil on canvas
75 x 78 2/3 inches
(190 x 200 cm)
© Francesco Clemente;
Courtesy the artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery
A Vienna museum surveys the career of the 1980s art star.
In the early 1980s, New York’s brash downtown art scene got a bit more elegant with the arrival of Francesco Clemente, an Italian painter and graphic artist known for his vivid yet ethereal treatments of the human figure. Barely 30, Mr. Clemente settled down with his young family in a loft on lower Broadway and soon became a leader in the art world’s turn away from conceptual art and minimalism, helping to usher in a figurative movement that just about everyone, other than Mr. Clemente himself, likes to call Neo-Expressionism.
Today Mr. Clemente, 70, is still going strong, while many of his friends and collaborators of the period are gone. On July 27, Vienna’s Albertina Museum will open “Francisco Clemente,” a career survey that includes 78 of the artist’s works, from a 1979 self-portrait to a 21st-century take on traditional tarot cards.