GINORI 1735 presents the 6th edition of the REBORN PROJECT, curated by Frédéric Chambre, which invites artists and designers to reinterpret the tableware and iconic porcelain of the Manifattura. The collections debut at Lévy Gorvy Dayan, where Clemente opens a major exhibition, Summer Love in the Fall, on October 29. The exhibition showcases recent large-scale paintings in oil, watercolors, and fresco, depicting the artist in a series of self-portraits punctuated by expressions of eros. Clemente’s work for the REBORN PROJECT comes alongside an exhibition at the Palazzo delle Esposizioni in Rome, and the opening of the eponymous Clemente Bar at Daniel Humm's 11 Madison Park, featuring four new site-specific artworks.
Before establishing his studio in New York in 1980, Clemente lived in India, where he studied Sanskrit as well as Hindu and Buddhist literature in the library of the Theosophical Society in Chennai. In New York, Clemente collaborated with artists Warhol and Basquiat and with poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, published the Hanuman Books with Raymond Foye, and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His work is featured in many prominent museum collections worldwide, including the Art Institute of Chicago; the Tate Gallery, London, Kunstmuseum Basel; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, Bilbao and New York; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York. Clemente lives and works in New York and India.
Francesco Clemente embodies the figure of the nomadic artist, travelling through geography, culture and mediums. He works in oil, fresco, encaustic, pastel, watercolor, and sculpture. In the 1970’s, Clemente fostered the return to painting as a relevant medium. Finding creative refuge in the philosophical, spiritual, and aesthetic traditions of the East, Clemente portrays a fragmented self and his figures are in a state of flux between worlds, spiritual and material, female and male, searching for a reconciliation.
Embracing his signature poetic intensity, using emblems and symbolism to consider the nature of the self, Francesco Clemente, together with the artists of the Manifattura, brings to life two sets of table services. Intertwining blue and white palettes, “Si Tu Savais” portrays an unruly yet romance-laden shipwreck of love, with symbols of the sea as a leitmotif throughout the collection. In a state of flux between the spiritual and material, “Grisaille Self-Portrait” features self-portraits of the artist whose face appears through immediate yet exacting brushstrokes upon the tableware.
