Francesco Clemente: Nostalgia/Utopia

Presented in this book are the paintings that compriseNostalgia/Utopia.The series brings together works completed in Italy and New York City, each with a highly imaginative narrative quality. In one, milk-painted quilt patterns are overlaid with fragments from Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s fantastical etchings of subterranean prisons. In another, yellow taxicabs queue up against a backdrop of erotically paired figures inspired by ancient Indian epics and myth. The elements in the paintings are at once familiar, mysterious, and rich in symbolic associations, leaving viewers with the impression that the paintings can be tied to no single time and place. The book also includes a new series of gouache and sanguine drawings by Clemente, as well as photographs of iconography directly related to these drawings.

 

Lavishly illustrated and including an essay by the poet Peter Lamborn Wilson,Francesco Clemente: Nostalgia/Utopiaoffers a look at the acclaimed artist’s newest work.