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Francesco Clemente was born in 1952, in Naples. He was raised in an aristocratic but not especially wealthy family at the time when WW II and fascism was still a very recent memory. Clemente studied architecture at the University of Rome where he felt profound existential crisis. In 1973 he moved to India, where he was influenced by local craftsmen, and engaged in several collaborations with Indian artists. During the course of time, the artist practically lived between New York and Varanasi, India, and has adopted the Indian philosophical concept of anatman (no-self), and with it, the idea that what we think of as our human identity is, in fact, a hollow mask.