ADAMI Valerio : LE CERVIN - screenprint by Valerio ADAMI

Valerio ADAMI

Valerio Adami, born 1935 in Bologna, is a painter and the most famous Italian representative of Pop Art.  In France, his adopted  country, he is part of the movement “Figuration Narrative.”

Educated at the Accademia di Brera in Milan, he has since worked in New York, Monaco, London and Paris.

In 1945, at the age of ten, he began to study painting under the instruction of Felice Carena. He was accepted into the Brera Academy (Accademia di Brera) 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 his early career, Adami's works were expressionistic, but by 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).

1965 he works were exposed in the exhibition “la figuration narrative” in Paris which was the beginning of that art movement.

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.

In 1974 he moved to Bavaria and illustrated a Helmut Heissenbuttel poem, Occasional Poem No. 27. Ten Lessons on the Reich with ten original lithographs {Gallerie Maeght}. In 1975, the philosopher Jacques Derrida devoted a long essay, "+R: Into the Bargain", to Adami's work, using an exhibition of Adami's drawings as a pretext to discuss the function of "the letter and the proper name in painting", with reference to "narration, technical reproduction, ideology, the phoneme, the biographeme, and politics".  In 1984 he stopped dating his artworks.  His works are shown in numerous art galleries all over the world.

He has had several major retrospectives, starting 1970 with the museum of modern art of Paris, followed by Valencia, Tokio, Tel Aviv, Siena, Bochum, Buenos Aires, Florenz, Athen, Locarno, Miami, Ravenna, Turin, Mantua, Perpignan, Wien , Boca Raton Museum of Art  and last but not least recently the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

PUBLIC COLLECTIONS

Belgium
Musée des beaux-arts, Brussels
Musée d’art moderne, Liège
Museum van Heedendaagse Kunst, Gent

Finland
Amos Anderson Art Museum, Helsinki
Aboa Vetus & Ars Nova Museum, Turku
Maija and Urpo Lahtinen Foundation, Villa Urpo, Tampere

France
Fondation Maeght, Saint-Paul-de-Vence
Fonds national d’art contemporain, Paris
Musée d’art moderne de la ville de Paris, Paris
Musée d’art moderne de Grenoble, Grenoble
Musée d’art moderne, Saint-Étienne
Musée Cantini d’art moderne de Marseille, Marseille
Musée national d’art moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou, Paris
Musée Picasso, Antibes
Musée de Strasbourg, Strasbourg

Germany
Staatliche Graphische Sammlung, Munich
Städtische Kunsthalle Mannheim, Mannheim

Greece
Frissiras Museum, Athens

Israel
Museum of Art, Tel Aviv

Italy
Museo d’Arte Moderna, Rome
Museo d’Arte Moderna Palazzo Reale, Milan
Galleria d’Arte Moderna, Bergamo

The Netherlands
Rotterdam Museum, Rotterdam

Portugal
Musée Bernardo, Lisbon

Spain
IVAM – Museo de Arte Moderno, Valencia
Fondaccion Miro, Barcelona

USA
Museum of Modern Art, Minneapolis
Museum of Modern Art, Pittsburg
Mc. Crory Corporation, New York

Venezuela
Museo de Arte Moderno, Caracas