Since the beginning of the 1980s Francesco Clemente (born in Naples in 1952) has been among the primary players of the Transavanguardia, an Italian movement dedicated to the renewal of figurative painting.

His painting groups together a variety of references originating in both Western and Eastern culture and mixes them together with history and autobiography. The image of the human body as a symbolic and erotic element is central to Clemente's iconography.

Clemente's "nomadic" disposition (he lives and works in Rome, Madras, and New York) is embodied in his painting technique, which often mirrors traditional methods indigenous to the place where he happens to be at the time of making the painting.