Valerio Adami
The painter Adami Valerio was born in Bologna on March 17, 1935.
His expressionist art is influenced by Francis Bacon’s work and then by abstract and gestural painting, with the problem of recovering figuration resolved according to the modules of American Pop Art and in particular Roy Lichtenstein.
His works are a kind of fantastic and ironic comic tale where in depersonalized interiors there are trivial objects, assumed as symbols of modernity.
The style is distinguished by the use of a chromatic material in flat, smooth and continuous shapes, inside the black net fences of the design.
At just four years old he moved with his family to Milan in the years of the war where he made his first drawings that represent ruins of the houses devastated by the bombings.
Still very young, Adami began painting in Venice with Felice Carena.
In 1951 two meetings took place for the artist, fundamental to his life as an artist. He met and attended Oscar Kokoschka and began studying drawing with Achille Funi at the Brera Academy in Milan.
In 1952 he first went to Paris, where he moved temporarily.
From 1960 Adami began a series of long stays that would take him, among other things, to London (1958) and New York (1966), a city where he would return several times, to Cuba (1967), to Caracas (1969), Bavaria (1974), India (1977), Israel (1979), Tokyo (1983), Scandinavia (1988), Argentina (1994).
These journeys are fundamental to the artist’s artistic activity. In fact, he weaves new friendships: writer Carlos Fuentes, philosopher Jacques Derrida, painters Saul Steinberg, Richard Lindner and Matta, Octavio Paz and Italo Calvino and Luciano Berio.
He exhibited his work at the Jewish Museum in New York in 1968, at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris in 1970, then at the Museum of Mexico City, Jerusalem, at the Centre Georges Pompidou in 1985, in Tel Aviv, Buenos Aires.
Since then, there have been numerous solo and group exhibitions, in public museums and private galleries, accompanied by catalogues of particular importance, with texts by critics, writers and philosophers. There are numerous commissions to Adami to create works in public spaces.
