Valerio Adami biography
- VALERIO ADAMI PAINTER
Valerio Adami is an italian painter among the leading exponents of the italian Pop Art.
He was born in Bologna on March 17, 1935 and a few years later he moved to Milan with his family.
Still very young, Valerio Adami began to paint in the studio of Felice Carena to Venice. Also in Venice, he met and frequented the Austrian painter and playwright Oscar Kokoschkawhich will have a great influence on him.
From 1954 he began to study drawing with Achille Funi all'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 It is Wifredo Lam.
In 1958 he won the Marzotto Award and the following year he inaugurated his first exhibition at the Naviglio Gallery from Milan.
In the 1960s, Valerio Adami worked between Italy, where he had his studio on Lake Orta, London and Paris. In 1964 he was present with a personal room at Documenta 3 of Kassel while in 1967, in New York, he created a series of canvases that he will exhibit the following year at the Venice Biennial.
In the following years, a series of long stays began for Valerio Adami which would take 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 establishes relationships of collaboration and friendship with the writer Carlos Fuentes, the philosopher Jacques Derrida, the painters Saul Steinberg, Richard Lindner, the poet Octavio Paz, Writer Italo Calvino and the composer Luciano Berio.
In 1980 he was selected by Bolaffi National Art Catalogue. In 1985 he created the eight stained glass windows of theHotel de Ville a Vitry-sur-Seine and then he created the two large panels for the atrium of the Gare D'Austerlitz in Paris. Subsequently he creates five wall panels for the First National City Bank in Madison and the great wall of ceramics for theAcademy of Fine Arts Of Cergy Pontoise, in France.
In 1985 the Georges Pompidou Center of Paris organizes a major retrospective of Valerio Adami, curated by Alfred Pacquement. In the following year the exhibition will be moved to the Royal Palace Of Milan.
The most recent personal exhibition, made up of works belonging to the artist's collection, was inaugurated in his presence on 12 October 2013 in Ravenna, at the MAR – City Art Museum.
Valerio Adami's works are initially influenced by expressionist painting Of Francis Bacon and then from one abstract-gestural painting. Only later will he approach the figuration according to the modules of the Pop Art americana and in particular of Roy Lichtenstein, developing a sort of fantastic and ironic comic story where, in depersonalized interiors, banal objects are arranged, assumed as symbols, even sexual, of modernity.
His works are characterized by the sharp black contours of the drawing in which the flat and continuous application of color is a secondary factor that completes the work, but which does not overlap with the importance of the drawing. These are works that are protagonists of a real chromatic evolution, moving more and more towards warmer and less aggressive colours.
Valerio Adami now lives between Paris and Meina, on Lake Maggiore.