Installation view “Francesco Clemente. Anima nomade”
Palazzo Esposizioni, Rome, 2024
Photo © Azienda Speciale Palaexpo/Alberto Novelli
It was 1979 when the young poet Achille Bonito Oliva used, for the first time on the pages of Flash Art, the term “transavanguardia “, thus defining the work of five young painters - Sandro Chia, Francesco Clemente, Enzo Cucchi, Nicola De Maria and Mimmo Paladino. This movement burst into the artistic system, overturning the intellectual and aesthetic dogmas of conceptual art, imposing itself with great pictorial works with a strong neo-expressionist matrix.
Among this talented progeny of authors the one most fascinated by the world was Francesco Clemente, who decided to make nomadism a way of life, choosing New York and its burgeoning cultural scene in the wake of Warhol as his base. Clemente has become a central figure in the world of contemporary art for his ability to intertwine cultures like no other, crossing geographical, cultural and artistic borders, esulting in a poetics in which human wandering, introspection and spirituality merge into a formal unicum.