Born in 1952 in Naples, where he taught himself painting, in the early seventies he moved to Rome, where he associated with Cy Twombly, Joseph Beuys and Alighiero Boetti, walking through Afghanistan with the latter in 1974. The dimension of the journey became an essential part of his poetics: after his first personal exhibition in Rome (1971) he often travelled to India, where he opened an atelier in Madras and where he still works together with Indian artists. In 1979 Achille Bonito Oliva listed him among the main figures of the Transavantgarde. In the eighties, with his wife Alba and their four children, he moved to New York, where he painted with Warhol and Basquiat (the series Collaborations, 1984) and worked together with poets such as Ricard, Ginsberg and Corso. His works have been exhibited at various international collective exhibitions from Content. A Contemporary Focus 1974-84 (Washington, 1984) to Avant-Garde in the Eighties (Los Angeles, 1987) and several editions of the Venice Biennale (1988, 1993, 1995, 1997), the Kassel dOCUMENTA (1992, 1997), the Whitney Biennial in New York, (1997) and in several retrospectives in Europe, America, China, Japan (Sezon Art Gallery in Tokyo) and recently in Sydney, Australia. Clemente particularly likes to experiment with diverse techniques and materials, taking his inspiration from ancient traditions: past and present, East and West, classicism and modernity, religion and myth all meet and overlap in his works, often produced as large formats and pictorial cycles. In 2012 Clemente was awarded the title of Knight of the Italian Republic. He is also a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.