photo: SAIKI Taku

Self-Portrait with Shoes and Glass

ArtistFrancesco CLEMENTE
Year1979
Material/ TechniqueChinese ink and gouache on paper, mounted on linen
Size/ DurationH202 × W497cm
Copyright Notice© Francesco CLEMENTE
Year of acquisition/ donation2001（作品購入年月日：2001/03/30）
DescriptionBorn in Naples, Italy in 1952. Lives and works in Rome, Italy; Chennai, India and New York, USA.

Francesco Clemente wrote many poems as a child and taught himself to paint. In 1972, after moving to Rome, he met Alighiero BOETTI and was heavily influenced by him. He later traveled to India and Afghanistan, whose culture and thought played an important role in his subsequent artistic activities. In the 1980s Clemente was associated with the Transavantguardia (Transavantgarde), the Italian version of the Neo-expressionism movement. He has spent time in different cultural spheres producing works that rely on a range of different techniques, including miniatures, mosaics, and frescoes, while also undertaking collaborations with artists such as Allen GINSBERG, Andy WARHOL, and Jean-Michel BASQUIAT. His work is characterized by fragmented images inspired by the free interplay of memories, cultures, ages, and sexual differences arising from his own introspection and experiences.

This work is one of 18 self-portraits drawn with Chinese ink and gouache on photography-background paper mounted on linen. On the left of the roughly five-meter long piece of paper the artist has drawn his own nude and a single glass, and on the right, a pair of shoes. The nude is deformed and fragmented. In discussing his approach to making art, the artist later commented that he seeks “to give the same weight to what’s interior and what’s exterior, and to consider the body as the line dividing the exterior from the interior.” This approach can also be seen in this work, where the artist, despite being the subject of the work, has placed himself on the same plane as the glass and the shoes, depicting his own inner world and the external environment on the same level. The work is an attempt to describe in the form of a self-portrait the relationship between the self and its surroundings, in which the self is not something fixed but rather something that is always fresh and unfamiliar and continually being reborn.

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