Francesco Clemente - Contemporary Art Evening Sale London Saturday, June 28, 2008 | Phillips

Create your first list.

Select an existing list or create a new list to share and manage lots you follow.

  • Provenance


    Anthony d'Offay Gallery, London

  • Exhibited

    London, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Francesco Clemente: The Painter's Wardrobe Anamorphic Paintings Self Portraits Tapestries and Pastels, 30 April – 16 June, 1999

  • Literature

    Exhibition Catalogue, Anthony d'Offay Gallery, Francesco Clemente: The Painter's Wardrobe Anamorphic Paintings Self Portraits Tapestries and Pastels, London, 1999, n.p.

  • Catalogue Essay

    Francesco Clemente is one of the leading artists in what the critic Achille Bonito Olivia's termed the ‘Transavanguardia' movement; the return to figurative painting. Like the work of Francis Bacon, Clemente's art is an art of sensation, which inflict distortions on perceived forms. His paintings begin with a preexisting image transforming its meaning by shifts as subtle as they are unpredictable.
    Despite his Italian roots, many of Clemente's paintings are heavily influenced by his contact with the imagery, spiritualism and mythology of India. He often uses the hand gesture, symbolic of sacred mantras and Indian dance, to signify human destiny. His faces as depicted here with distinctive brows and exaggerated full lips portray a range of personas, fundamental to his work and are expressed through his use of colour.
    "When looking at the dazzling palette in this taut miniretrospective of Francesco Clemente's paintings, how easy it is to state that here is someone using color to sort out the various manifestations (comic, horrific) of the self. Again and again, Clemente's beautiful head - attached to or severed from his body - in shades of umber, brick, and sugared pinks, raises questions of identity (Who am I? What does that mean?)" (B. Hainley, ‘Francesco Clemente – Peter Blum, New York' in Art Forum, 1996).

273

Tongue

1998
Oil on canvas.
116.5 x 234 cm. (45 7/8 x 92 1/8 in).
Signed, titled and dated ‘‘Tongue' 1998 Francesco Clemente' on the overlap.

Estimate
£100,000 - 150,000 

Sold for £121,250

Contemporary Art Evening Sale

29 June 2008, 5pm
London