Mother’s Room

In the years around 1980 Francesco Clemente was one of a group of young Italian painters who broke free from the sterile abstraction of Minimalism and the humble materialism of Arte Povera, art movements that had pronounced painting, especially figurative painting, dead. The painting revival that began in Italy sparked an international stylistic shift that persisted throughout the 1980s and involved artists such as Georg Baselitz, Anselm Kiefer, and Julian Schnabel. Known broadly as Neo-Expressionism, this movement revitalized painting and brought back individual expression by using sensuous color, gestural technique, narrative content, and the human figure on a grand scale.

Mother's Room (La stanza della madre) was a commission for the inauguration of the Guggenheim Museum Bilbao. This group of 17 panels evokes the large-scale decorative murals of Medieval and Renaissance palaces. As is usual with Clemente, elements from previous works reappear here. The artist's recurrent motifs preclude a strictly linear reading of stylistic development in his oeuvre and serve as a visual lexicon linking one work to the next. References to elemental forces—earth, water, fire, and air—are juxtaposed with symbolism from Indian culture, religious history, and astrology. In Mother's Room, Clemente used a stage backdrop from the 1920s as his canvas. The patches in the material and its faded background design serve as the basis for the painting and enhance the lyricism of the work. The word stanza (room) in the work's title brings to mind Renaissance stanze, rooms that provided refuge from the outside world.