Francesco Clemente: Pastels

Francesco Clemente: Pastels illuminates Clemente’s extraordinary creative synthesis of diverse aesthetic, cultural, and spiritual traditions. Curated by architect Bill Katz, a long-time friend of the artist, the exhibition is organised thematically, presenting Clemente’s expressions of the body and mind through his extended commitment to the medium.

Clemente has often turned to pastels to develop his eclectic visions of physical and metaphysical subjects. The medium is well-suited to the intensity of these works on paper through their brilliantly saturated colour, directness of line, and the autographic immediacy in the artist’s application. Over the past four decades, he has developed polymorphic, unabashedly sexual imagery that invokes perennial cycles of life and death. Visualising humanity in figurative and mythological terms, he employs metaphor to bridge individual differences and to reveal intercultural aspects of our existence.