Opening on March 20, LGDR & Wei is pleased to present Winter Flowers, Francesco Clemente's first solo exhibition in Hong Kong. Featuring fourteen new paintings, all completed in 2023, from the artist's radiant series by the same name, this presentation meditates on resilience, presence, and pleasure.

Initiated in 2010, Clemente's Winter Flowers series emerged from a collaboration with the artist's wife of nearly five decades, the actress and choreographer Alba Primiceri. One winter, Alba brought an assortment of flowers to Clemente's New York studio. Plucked from the city's parks and gardens, these blooms had survived the cold. Inspired by their enduring beauty, Clemente embarked on a series of floral paintings using a carefully determined selection of plant and vegetable pigments. As they took form, the paintings' relation to the winter season became consonant with the artist's contemplation of old age. While the flower has been used in traditional vanitas paintings to represent impermanence and the inevitability of decay, Clemente depicts blossoms to celebrate the beauty that can be found in all stages of life.

The Winter Flowers canvases, each a large square format, feature abundant displays of color, texture, and form. Rhythmic compositions of petals, leaves, stamen, and seed pods move between abstraction and figuration. The largest two canvases are painted in grisaille, a painting technique in which an image is created entirely in shades of gray. Inspired by the grisaille works of the late- Baroque painter Luca Giordano, from Clemente's hometown of Naples, as well as contemporary Balinese grisaille painting, the artist has worked in this manner in previous series, including his Grisaille Self-Portraits of the late 1990s. Here, we see Clemente applying grisaille to his Winter Flowers for the first time.

The materials Clemente selected for the series mandate a slow execution in several phases, imbuing the works with an energy of spiritual contemplation. Clemente has compared his process in painting these canvases to that of weaving, wherein compositional threads appear and disappear. Rather than developing in a linear fashion, the paintings grow radially, in surprising directions from various centres of interest. This mode of creating, he explains, corresponds most to his understanding of consciousness: 'I believe that the most accurate description of our consciousness is continuity of discontinuity. So, I indicate with my work the fact that we have a fragmented self and I'm interested in the gaps that separate all our different personas.'

Throughout his career, Clemente has returned to botanical motifs, whether as ornamental vegetation or symbolically redolent perennials. With Winter Flowers, the artist offers a deeply personal yet universally resonant reflection on temporality and joy.

Press release courtesy Lévy Gorvy Dayan & Wei.