Francesco Clemente - Contemporary Art & Design Evening Sale New York Thursday, March 7, 2013 | Phillips

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  • Provenance

    Gagosian Gallery, Los Angeles
    Private collection

  • Exhibited

    Dusseldorf, Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, The Self is Something Else, Art at the End of the 20th Century, February 19 – June 18, 2000

  • Literature

    Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen, The Self is Something Else, Art at the End of the 20th Century, Dusseldorf, 2000, cat no. 36, p. 193 (illustrated)

  • Catalogue Essay

    A formative member of the Neo- Expressionist movement Francesco Clemente has held a longstanding reputation as a provocative and vibrant painter. Beginning his career in his native Italy during the late 1970s, Clemente participated in the artistic shift from Minimalism and Arte Povera towards a renewed practice of figurative painting. Labeled Transavanguardia by critic Achille Bonito Oliva, this revival pronounced strong interest in narrative content, dramatic color, and more fluid, gestural technique. At the age of 28, Clemente’s participation in the 1980 Venice Biennale would grant him international recognition and he soon found himself residing in New York. By this time, the artist had already established a mature style, evidenced by his collaborative productions with icons such as Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat. As further afformation of his contribution, just one short year after the creation of the present lot, Zip, 1998, Clemente would become the youngest living artist to receive a full-museum retrospective at the Guggenheim museum. Indeed, Zip, 1998, exemplifies a poetic culmination of Clemente’s artistic vocabulary, imbued with the sophistication and culture of a well seasoned traveler.

    Self-portraiture has remained a constant exploration throughout Clemente’s oeuvre in tandem with the notion of identity. Expressing a dream-like quality that straddles the surrealistic borders of psychological and mystical settings. The gulf between the corporeal and the psychological realms is emphasized in Zip. The horizontalality of the canvas is divided into three areas by a large zipper: the leftmost area depicting the artist gazing off to the side, his wide eyes revealing streams of tears; the rightmost area of the canvas revealing daggers brandished with evocative text; while the central area suggests the calmness of flight and freedom under an expanse of clear blue sky. In Clemente’s Zip, the complexity of internal dialogue is rendered through the fragmented composition, where symbolism and self are both bound together and liberated by moving mechanism.

37

Zip

1998
oil on linen
46 x 92 in. (116.8 x 233.7 cm)

Estimate
$80,000 - 120,000 

Sold for $68,500

Contemporary Art & Design Evening Sale

7 March 2013
New York