Few contemporary artists have had the broad appeal of Francesco Clemente, whose wide-eyed portraits and bold manipulation of images from art and popular culture have established him as one of the foremost artists working today. Clemente continues to draw inspiration from a wide range of cultural sources in his most recent series, Nostalgia/Utopia, currently on display at the Mary Boone Gallery in New York.Presented in this book are the paintings that comprise Nostalgia/Utopia. The series brings together works completed in Italy and New York City, each with a highly imaginative narrative quality. In one, milk-painted quilt patterns are overlaid with fragments from Italian artist Giovanni Battista Piranesi’s fantastical etchings of subterranean prisons. In another, yellow taxicabs queue up against a backdrop of erotically paired figures inspired by ancient Indian epics and myth. The elements in the paintings are at once familiar, mysterious, and rich in symbolic associations, leaving...