THE POOL NYC is thrilled to present CLEMENTE-HALLEY-SCHNABEL, an exhibition that brings together three crucial figures of our times. The three artists were born within a year of each other and grew professionally in New York. Similar, different, distant and very close, they are undoubtedly among the major artists of the Contemporary Art Scene. We are very proud to present a series of works from 1986 to 2010.
New York is dangerous, subversive, misleading, erotic, very dirty, chaotic and extremely artistic. There is a smell of marijuana already on Houston Street, and it increases the further east you go. SoHo, NoHo, ABC, the Lower East Side are areas to avoid, because robberies, crime, weapons and drugs are the backdrop. Precisely at the stroke of the roaring 80s, with the aforementioned milieu, three artists who have little in common, both in terms of education and origin, breathe the contagious energy of what is the only true City in the Western world. I Love NY, but NY doesn’t love you goes a New York saying; and that’s right, everything you do happens because you earned it. There has always been a desire for art in the air, a desire for painting and colour, exuberance. Enough Minimal, enough Conceptual Art: let the figures, strong lines and bright colors return.
FRANCESCO CLEMENTE (Naples, 1952) is one of the protagonists of the Transavanguardia Movement. He lives and works between New York and India. His works are always connected to a travel itinerary, they refer to the cultural traditions of the country visited, they bring back the voices of distant lands, they are intertwined with the personal biography of the artist, feeding on the passions, desires and emotions that animate him.
In constant balance between a narrative and an imaginative dimension, he places the human figure at the center of his interests. The body as a border line that divides the inside from the outside becomes a tool for deepening oneself and for understanding the reality that surrounds it. Often the artist appears with eyes enlarged beyond measure or his body is subject to distortions and deformations. It is a way to observe oneself and others from different, unusual perspectives, a sort of documentation of the self whose continuous repetition does not define fragmentation or dispersion, but always represents a new rebirth.
In 1980 he moved to New York, where he collaborated with poets such as Allen Ginsberg and Robert Creeley, and with artists such as Jean-Michel Basquiat and Andy Warhol. Together with Raymond Foye he established the publishing company Hanuman Books, also becoming a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.
His works are exhibited in many prestigious museum collections around the world, including the Art Institute of Chicago, the Tate Gallery in London, the Kunstmuseum in Basel, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao and New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.
PETER HALLEY (New York, 1953) graduated from Yale University, received his PhD from the University of New Orleans in 1978; lives and works in New York.
Peter Halley’s artistic research moves in the field of geometric abstraction and in his paintings square and rectangular shapes, defined by the artist as ‘cells’ or ‘prisons’, relate to each other through square-section ducts, representing the growing geometrization of the social space of the contemporary electronic technological world and inviting us to reflect on the effects of psychological pressure produced on human life. The minimalist geometry recalls electronic circuit boards and the intense and brilliant colors used – obtained thanks to the use of Day-Glo colors – refer to the waves of luminous flows produced by technological society. Peter Halley fits culturally into the process of evolution of abstract language starting from Cézanne, passing through Malevich, Mondrian, Albers and American minimalism – among which, first of all, Stella – also dialoguing with different languages, such as abstract expressionism.
Peter Halley has exhibited in the most important international galleries and museum institutions including: the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the CAPC Musée d’Art Contemporain in Bordeaux, the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Stedelijk Museum in Amsterdam , the Dallas Museum of Art, the Folkwang Museum in Essen and the Butler Institute of American Art. Despite his success, Halley’s rigorous conceptualism has historically been better received in Europe. Halley has written and published texts on art and culture, addressing the themes of structuralism, post-modernism, and the digital revolution of the 1980s. In 2001, he received the Frank Jewett Mather Award from the College Art Association in the United States for his critical writing. He has taught at Columbia University, the University of California at Los Angeles and the School of Visual Arts. Hey was director of Graduate Studies in painting and printmaking at Yale University School of Art (2002-2011).
JULIAN SCHNABEL (Brooklyn, NY, 1951), lives and works in New York.
A graduate of the University of Houston, Julian had his first exhibition in 1979 at Mary Boone Gallery in New York. From that moment on it was a succession of successes, so much so that his works, from sculpture to painting, are exhibited in museums and collections all over the world, from the MOMA in New York to the Guggenheim in Bilbao, becoming a leading exponent of neo-expressionism.
Painter, sculptor and director, Julian Schnabel stands out for his astonishing metamorphic ability and the overwhelming expressive force that he communicates through his works. A talent born from painting that led him to explore more artistic fields and to try his hand at the world of cinema where he succeeded as an excellent director with the films Basquiat in 1996, or The Diving Bell and the Butterfly in 2007 (winner of the award for best director at the Cannes). Schnabel’s cinematographic production is closely related to his artistic production to the point that his films can be considered a natural continuation of his pictorial vein.