Francesco Clemente: Nostalgia/Utopia

Few contemporary artists have had the broad appeal of Francesco Clemente, whose wide-eyed portraits and bold manipulation of images from art and popular culture have established him as one of the foremost artists working today. Clemente continues to draw inspiration from a wide range of cultural sources in his most recent series, , currently on display at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York. Presented in this book are the paintings that comprise The series brings together works completed in Italy and New York City, each with a highly imaginative narrative quality. In one, milk-painted quilt patterns are overlaid with fragments from Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s fantastical etchings of subterranean prisons. In another, yellow taxicabs queue up against a backdrop of erotically paired figures inspired by ancient Indian epics and myth. The elements in the paintings are at once familiar, mysterious, and rich in symbolic associations, leaving viewers with the impression that the paintings can be tied to no single time and place. The book also includes a new series of gouache and sanguine drawings by Clemente, as well as photographs of iconography directly related to these drawings. Lavishly illustrated and including an essay by the poet Peter Lamborn Wilson, offers a look at the acclaimed artist’s newest work.