Ben Apfelbaum

FRANCESCO CLEMENTE’S ENCAMPMENT ENVELOPES CARRIAGEWORKS

Artist Fracesco Clemente with exhibition curator Mia Niall.

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Artist Fracesco Clemente with exhibition curator Mia Niall. Images by Ben Apfelbaum.

Carriageworks is presenting the first major exhibition in Australia of work by acclaimed Italian contemporary artist Francesco Clemente.

Presented free to the public from July 30 until October 9 Francesco Clemente’s ENCAMPMENT will include six of Clemente’s large scale tents, transforming thirty thousand square feet of exhibition space within Carriageworks into an opulent tented village.

For this exhibition, Clemente has collaborated with a community of artisans in Rajasthan, India over three years from 2012- 2014 to create a series of tents, with individual tents measuring up to 18 feet wide and 10 feet high. Viewers will be invited to walk around, amongst and inside the tents to explore the works from different perspectives.

Exhibited alongside the artist’s tent are four altar-like vertical sculptures- titled Earth, Moon, Sun and Hunger– which marry references to contemporary life with archaic forms. The exhibition also features a suite of nineteen erotically-charged paintings from a series entitled No Mud, No Lotus (2013-2014) which draws on traditions of a MUGHAL miniature painting.

Francesco Clemente came to prominence in the mid nineteen seventies and is widely recognised as one of the most remarkable and evocative artists working today, with work from his four-decade long career being collected by major museums and private collections around the world.

Published by Ben Apfelbaum

My photography began when my father handed me the proverbial brownie box camera as a child. As cameras developed I went through Fujica and Olympus range finders graduating to my first single lens reflex camera, the Minolta SRT101, the latter being the greatest facilitator to my growth as a photographer. Digital photography has only added to this. I was a regular contributor to Camera Craft magazine (Australian Camera ) for over three years. During Australia’s Bicentennial year (1988) I made it a personal project to document the celebrations. This culminated in the creation of a book of my photos which was published in 1989. The book was called CELEBRATING AUSTRALIA and came with an accompanying calendar. My works have appeared in a number of publications including the coffee book entitled MY AUSTRALIA (1989), publisher Robertsbridge Severn. This book had a preface by the then Australian Prime Minister Bob Hawke. I was a co-photographer on a book entitled SYDNEY- DISCOVER THE CITY with text written by Robert Treborland. Major Mitchell Press was the publisher. Also for two years I was the photographer for calendars celebrating Sydney’s multicultural communities. The two calendars were entitled MULTICULTURAL SYDNEY. My work appeared in a group exhibition held at Sydney’s Town Hall pertaining to the diversity of life in South America to raise money for orphanages there. I have over one hundred photos stored in the New South Wales State Library archive. I had a solo exhibition held in 2007 entitled Ben’s Lens at the Sydney Jewish Museum which celebrated the vibrancy of the Sydney Jewish community. Some of these photos are on the Museum’s permanent display. I have exhibited internationally firstly at the Spruill Gallery in Atlanta Georgia, united states, and in an exhibition entitled Kosher and Co at the Jewish Museum in Berlin. Currently I am a regular contributor to J-Wire and this esteemed publication.