Valerio Adami is an Italian painter among the main exponents of Italian Pop Art. He was born in Bologna on 17 March 1935 and a few years later he moved to Milan with his family. Still very young, Valerio Adami began painting in Felice Carena's studio in Venice. Also in Venice he met and frequented the Austrian painter and playwright Oscar Kokoschka, who would have a great influence on him.
In 1954 he began studying drawing with Achille Funi at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts in Milan. The following year he stayed in Paris where he met and frequented artists such as Roberto Sebastian Matta and Wifredo Lam . In 1958 he won the Premio Marzotto and the following year inaugurated his first exhibition at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan.
In the 1960s, Valerio Adami worked between Italy, where he has studios on Lake Orta, London and Paris. In 1964 he was present with a personal room at Documenta 3 in Kassel while in 1967, in New York, he created a series of canvases which he exhibited the following year at the Venice Biennale. In the following years, a series of long stays began for Valerio Adami which took him, among other things, to Cuba (1967), Caracas (1969), Bavaria (1974), India (1977), Israel (1979). , in Tokyo (1983), in Scandinavia (1988) and in Argentina (1994). During these trips the artist established collaborative and friendly relationships with the writer Carlos Fuentes, the philosopher Jacques Derrida, the painters Saul Steinberg, Richard Lindner, the poet Octavio Paz, the writer Italo Calvino and the composer Luciano Berio. In 1980 he was selected by the Bolaffi National Art Catalogue.
In 1985 he created the eight windows of the Hotel de Ville in Vitry-sur-Seine and subsequently created the two large panels for the atrium of the Gare D' Austerlitz in Paris. He subsequently created five wall panels for the First National City Bank in Madison and the large ceramic wall for the Academy of Fine Arts in Cergy-Pontoise, in France.
In 1985 the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris organized a major retrospective of Valerio Adami, curated by Alfred Pacquement. In the following year the exhibition will be transferred to the Palazzo Reale in Milan. The most recent personal exhibition, composed of works belonging to the artist's collection, was inaugurated in his presence on 12 October 2013 in Ravenna, at the MAR – Museum of Art of the city.
Valerio Adami's works are initially influenced by the expressionist painting of Francis Bacon and then by a abstract-gestural painting. Only later will he approach figuration according to the modules of American Pop Art and in particular of Roy Lichtenstein, developing a sort of story fantastic and ironic comics where, in depersonalized interiors, banal objects are arranged, taken as symbols, even sexual, of modernity. His works are characterized by the clear black outlines of the drawing in which the application of colour, flat and continuous, is a secondary factor that completes the work, but which does not overlap with the importance of the drawing. These are works that are the protagonists of a real chromatic evolution, increasingly moving towards warmer and less aggressive colours. Valerio Adami today lives between Paris and Meina, on Lake Maggiore.
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