Valerio Adami

Valerio Adami is an Italian painter. Starting with expressionist painting influenced by the work of Francis Bacon and then by abstract - gestural painting, he later set himself the problem of recovering resolved figuration, according to the modules of American Pop Art and in particular Roy Lichtenstein, developing a kind of fantastic and ironic comic strip story where in depersonalized interiors banal objects are arranged, taken as symbols, even sexual, of modernity. The style is distinguished in the use of a chromatic matter in flat, smooth and continuous layering within the sharp black fences of drawing.

From 1954 he attended the Brera Academy in Milan, under the guidance of Achille Funi. In 1955 he made his first trip to Paris, where he came into contact with the painters Wifredo Lam and Roberto Sebastian Matta. In 1958, he participated in the Marzotto Prize, winning it ex aequo, and in 1959 held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria del Naviglio in Milan. He worked between London and Paris from 1961 to 1964, when he was present with a solo room at Documenta 3 in Kassel; in 1967 in New York he made a series of canvases that he exhibited the following year at the Venice Biennale.

Since 1969 he has held solo shows at Studio Marconi in Milan; in 1985 he executed the eight stained-glass windows for the new Hôtel de Ville in Vitry-sur-Seine and an anthological exhibition appeared at the Centre Pompidou in Paris; in 1980 he was selected by the Bolaffi National Art Catalogue (no. 15) along with Giulio Paolini, Mimmo Paladino, Lucio Bulgarelli, Sergio Cassano and Gianfranco Goberti; in 1986 he participates in the XLII Venice Biennale and between this last year and 1987 he makes the two large panels for the atrium of the Gare d'Austerlitz in Paris; next are the five wall panels for the First National City Bank in Madison and the large ceramic wall for the new school of fine arts in Cergy-Pontoise.

He participated in a series of retrospectives in Madrid in 1991, Siena in 1994, Bochum in 1997 and Buenos Aires in 1998. His most recent solo exhibition, composed of works from the artist's own collection, opened in his presence on October 12, 2013, in Ravenna, Italy, at the MAR - Museo d'Arte della città (October 12 - December 8, 2013). His 1967 silkscreen print Untitled is preserved at the Museo Cantonale d'arte in Lugano.