Valerio Adami

Valerio Adami was born on March 17, 1935 in the Italian city of Bologna. Adami took up his studies at the age of 16 at the Academy Brera in Milan. During his studies in Venice Adami met Kokoschka and Matta. He showed his first single exhibition in Milan in 1957. In the year 1962 Adami married Camilla and settled down in Arona at the Lago Maggiore. In 1974 Adami moves to Bavaria where he and Helmut Heisenbüttel published the book "Das Reich". After 1974 he travelled to India, the USA and Israel. In 1981 Valerio Adami was commissioned to create a big ceramic wall for the Nouvelle École Nationale des Beaux-Arts in Cercy-Pontoise. In 1984 he ceased dating his pictures. Two years later, in 1986, the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris exhibited a retrospective of the painter's work. Valerio Adami is an Italian painter. Educated at the Accademia di Brera in Milan , he has since worked in both London and Paris. His art carries obvious influence from Pop Art. He was born in Bologna, and by 1945 he was studying painting from Felice Carena. He was accepted into the Brera Academy in 1951, and there studied as a draughtsman until 1954 in the studio of Achille Funi. In 1955 he went to Paris, where he met and was influenced by Roberto Matta and Wifredo Lam. His first solo exhibition came in 1959 in Milan. In these early years, Adami's works were expressionistic, but around the time of his second exhibition in 1964 at Kassel, he had developed a style of painting reminiscent of French cloisonnism, featuring regions of flat color bordered by black lines. Unlike Gauguin, however, Adami's subjects were highly stylized and often presented in fragments, as seen in Telescoping Rooms (1965). In the 1970s, Adami began to address politics in his art, and incorporated subject matter such as modern European history, literature, philosophy, and mythology. In 1971, he and his brother Gioncarlo created the film Vacances dans le désert. From 1985 to 1998, there were four retrospective exhibits of Adami's work in Paris, the Centre Julio-Gonzalez de Valence (Spain), Tel Aviv, and Buenos Aires. Jacques Derrida, the famous philosopher, launched an investigation of Adami's works in 'The Truth in Painting', specifically on his use of the frame ('the paregon').