Installation View of “Twenty Years of Painting: 2001-2021” at Vito Schnabel Gallery at The Old Santa Monica Post Office © Francesco Clemente; Photo by Elon Schoenholz; Courtesy the artist and Vito Schnabel Gallery
“Painting is an ideal medium to return to the sources of imagination. Imagination seen not as an arbitrary faculty, but as a way to know reality.”
— Francesco Clemente
Vito Schnabel Gallery presents Francesco Clemente “Twenty Years of Painting: 2001-2021” in the Old Santa Monica Post Office. The internationally acclaimed artist’s first Los Angeles solo exhibition in nearly two decades, “Twenty Years of Painting” features thirty works that reveal Clemente’s remarkable mastery of the many mediums that fall within the tradition of painting– from fresco on plaster panels and watercolor on paper, to oils and mixed media pigments on canvas, linen, and glass– and bring viewers along on his journey through themes both metaphysical and sensual. The exhibition includes a suite of monumental new paintings created during the course of the pandemic.