Francesco Clemente
Vito Schnabel Gallery is pleased to announce the opening of Francesco Clemente: Travel Diary on January 28, 2026 in New York. The exhibition, featuring works made over the last twenty-five years, will be on view at the gallery’s Chelsea location through April 18, 2026.
The idea of taking a journey has always been central to Clemente’s artistic practice as both a theme and a goal. His visual language draws upon the emblems and symbols of both Eastern and Western mystical traditions, reanimating them through personal experiences. Exploring themes of identity, spirituality, and mythology, Clemente’s work is distinguished by a rich use of allegory, symbolism, and iconography inspired by his extensive travels throughout India, Afghanistan, China, Brazil, North Africa, and the Caribbean.
Each work in Travel Diary relates to a different place and a distinct experience of the past. The past is essential, for it indicates responsibility. Without responsibility, the artist cannot invent the future, nor sustain the hope that emerges from imagining it. As Clemente notes, “Today, hope in the future may be the only sensible political act that remains.”
The question arises: does Clemente travel in search of a home, or in an effort to leave behind the notion of a home? In this exhibition, home appears as a tree house in his painting, My Tree House (2015-16). Upon it, Clemente raises a white flag– a gesture of surrender to the cruelty of life, and at the same time, to the sweetness of painting and its redemptive power.
The earliest works in the exhibition are two monumental pieces from 2001, which are painted with the white paint of street signage on denim and were inspired by a group of works the artist encountered in Genoa. Attributed to the school of Giulio Romano, these were created to cover the walls of a church for a single day each year, on Good Friday.
Gandhara Dream (2012) takes its title from Gandhara sculptures– Hellenistic works produced in present-day Afghanistan approximately two thousand years ago. In another work, The Ark (2012), Noah’s Ark drifts across a sea of Sanskrit letters drawn from an ancient text from around the same time. In Atlantic Forest (2006), a column of nails emerges as a memory of the artist’s experiences in a terreiro, the sacred ground of Afro-Brazilian religion still active in Brazil today.
Two works in the exhibition feature an eight-spoked wheel, borrowed from the Buddhist tradition: in Trungpa (2012), a small, defenseless bird holds a brush in his beak atop a human skull. The bird appears in red alone, amidst a background of oxide copper green birds; perhaps an analogy for the artist. In Wheel of Fortune (2012-14), a secret Japanese Buddha appears as two elephant-headed figures embracing.
The most recent painting in the exhibition, Winter Flowers in Spring II (2025), reaffirms the artist’s belief that somewhere in the coldness of times of destruction, something beautiful may be coming to life.
On the occasion of the exhibition, a catalogue will be published on the last seven years of Vito Schnabel Gallery's representation of Francesco Clemente. The book features an essay by Joachim Pissarro and an in depth conversation between Francesco Clemente and artist Kiki Smith.
About the Artist
Francesco Clemente was born in 1952 in Naples, Italy. He studied architecture at the Università degli Studi di Roma, La Sapienza in Rome in 1970, before turning his focus instead to art.
In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, at a time when painting had been declared obsolete, Clemente’s work– together with other artists of his generation– played a significant role in the revival of the medium. After moving to New York in the 1980s, Clemente pioneered, through his nomadic lifestyle, the image of the artist engaged globally. He is a master of the many mediums that fall within the tradition of paintings, from fresco to watercolor to oil and mixed media pigments on canvas.
Clemente’s work has been presented at numerous international institutions, including Nationalgalerie, Berlin; Museum für Gegenwartskunst, Basel; Philadelphia Museum of Art; Royal Academy of Arts, London; Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris; Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bologna; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; Sezon Museum of Art, Tokyo; Museo Archeologico Nazionale di Napoli; and Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence.
His work is featured in many prominent museum collections worldwide, including the Albertina Museum, Vienna; Art Institute of Chicago; Miami Art Museum; Kunstmuseum Basel; Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Guggenheim Museum Bilbao; The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; The Museum of Modern Art, New York.
Francesco Clemente lives and works in New York, Chennai, and Varanasi, India.