Francesco Clemente

Francesco Clemente (b. 1952, Naples, Italy) is an Italian contemporary artist who lives and works in New York. Clemente studied architecture at the Sapienza University of Rome before traveling to India at the age of nineteen, where he studied Sanskrit and literature. Clemente later relocated to Manhattan, becoming involved in the downtown New York art scene and collaborating with artists including Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. He has been the subject of major retrospectives at the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis; Dallas Museum of Art, TX; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; Centre Pompidou, Paris; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, NY; Guggenheim, Bilbao; and Schirn Kunstalle, Frankfurt. His work is held in major public collections internationally, including the Museum of Modern Art, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, and the Art Institute of Chicago.