Francesco Clemente. Palimpsest

This exhibition at the Schirn Kunsthalle is the first comprehensive showing of his paintings and drawings in Germany in more than a quarter century. It brings together more than forty works made between 1978 and 2011. Taking as its starting point Clemente’s early works on paper, the show also includes not just large format paintings but also more recent, spectacular monumental watercolors. The exhibition, which has been conceptualized in close cooperation with the artist, brings to light for the first time the close resemblance of Clemente’s aesthetic to the manner in which references are actualized in a palimpsest: effacement, partial erasure, and superimposition of writing surfaces. In so doing it reveals a concern at the centre of his oeuvre: Clemente’s conviction in his role as an artist as a kind of universal witness of consciousness.
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