About this work
Francesco Clemente’s drawings, paintings and prints reflect an itinerant life spent living between New York, Rome, Madras and New Mexico. In the 1970s Clemente became a key practitioner of Neo-Expressionism. Neo-Expressionist artists typically produced large-scale, gestural paintings that challenged the austerity of much 1960s–70s art, such as Minimalist, Pop and Conceptual Art. Clemente’s works are often charged with a mystical, dreamlike sensibility. The midnight sun XII is the last work in a series of the same name that Clemente made in the year he moved to New York and began creating large-scale oil paintings.