BRUSSELS.- After 20 years at the Rue de la Régence, Jablonka Maruani Mercier Gallery announces its move to Avenue Louise 430, to be inaugurated on September 8th 2016 with the first solo show in Belgium of Francesco Clemente.

The new location, with a primary entrance on Avenue Louise 430, is four times bigger than the previous one, in a brand new building designed by internationally renowned architect, Marc Corbiau.

With four modular viewing rooms, the new space will allow the artists to envision their exhibitions with even greater freedom.

The Jablonka, Maruani, Mercier Gallery will be exhibiting three series of Francesco Clemente's work, at the occasion of the festive opening of the new Gallery Space at the Avenue Louise.

Model Portraits (painted in New York City)
Harper’s Bazaar asked Francesco Clemente to paint 6 portraits of six generations of Top Models, proving that one can be beautiful at all ages and that all ages are beautiful... The chosen models include : Anna Ewers, Liya Kedebe, Christy Turlington, Linda Evangelista, Lauren Hutton & Iman. This resulted in a 10-page spread in the April issue of Harper's Bazaar with the theme “fabulous at every age” and the stories of these women. All models posed with their painting... except for Iman, her husband David Bowie just died... In this case every painting tells a story about much more than beauty: about life and death and ...life! The paintings are shown for the first time to the public.

Talismans (painted in India)
The Talismans serie is inspired by the subject of fertility. During his last trip in India, Clemente has made a collaboration with an Indian artist who painted detailled symbols of the Indian Culture.

Making Love in a Fleeting World (painted in St. Barts).
The twelve watercolours depict multiple Kamasutra positions.

Francesco Clemente, born in Naples in 1952, lives and works in NewYork, Rome and in India today. Alongside Chia, Cucchi and Paladino, he is considered one of the exponents of the Italian "Transavanguardia", although he himself is not fond of being associatedwith specific art movements. In 1970 he begins to study architecture in Rome, although he does not complete his studies. Already in 1971 he has his first one-man show at Galleria Valle Giulia in Rome. Shortly afterwards he travels to India and Afghanistan for the first time, together with the artist Alighiero Boetti amongst others.

In 1981 Clemente emigrates to New York, where he quickly makes friends with Jean- Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, Kenny Scharf and other major figures of the art scene. In the 1980s he begins to work in increasingly large format in oil, and also experiments with other media and techniques. His work is strongly influenced by various foreign cultures, especially that of India. Spirituality, various religions, symbolic self-portraits and an examination of his own position in the world, are fundamental themes and points of interest in his art. His pictorial language corresponds fully with his imagination and influences from the Far East. "My work runs through iconography. It doesn't promote one iconography over another. I carry inside me the idea that it's better to be many than one, that many gods are better than just one god, many truths are better than one alone." (cit.: F. Clemente in: Francesco Clemente, Exh. Cat., Arts Council of Northern Ireland, Belfast, 1984).

Francesco Clemente’s paintings, drawings, prints and illustrated books were featured in shows at numerous international venues including the Whitechapel Art Gallery, London (1983); the Nationalgalerie, Berlin (1984); the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (1985); the Art Institute of Chicago (1987); and the Dia Center for the Arts, New York (1988). Through the 1990's, surveys of his work were exhibited by the Philadelphia Museum of Art (1990); the Royal Academy of the Arts, London (1990); the Pompidou Center, Paris (1994); and the Sezon Museum, Tokyo (1994). In 1999/2000, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York and the Guggenheim Bilbao organiseda major retrospective of Clemente’s work.

More recently, exhibitions were held at the Rubin Museum of Art, New York (2014), Casamadre Arte Contemporanea in Naples (2014), & MASS MoCa, Massachusetts (2015).

He has participated in numerous collaborative projects, painting with Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol, and illuminating poetry by Robert Creeley, Allen Ginsberg, John Wieners and Rene Ricard.

Francesco Clemente is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.