VALERIO ADAMI
Bolonia, 1935 

He studied drawing at the Accademia di Brera (1951-54) with Achille Funi, a painter of the Futurist generation, who transmitted to him his passion for the great masters of the Italian Renaissance. However, the work that he presented for the first time in Milan in 1958 showed a very gestual style influenced by Informalism. Although soon favourably received outside Italy, his work gradually lost this quality. In the mid-sixties, echoing the anti-Informalist offensive of the beginning of the decade, he adopted a very personal figuration, subordinated to drawing and the line and visually close to Pop Art, which he maintained with minimal formal variations throughout his career. The first works of this new aesthetics, inspired by New York themes and settings, were exhibited in Milan, Brussels and Turin. He then took part in the Biennale di Venezia (1968), various group exhibitions of Italian art held in the USA in 1968, and a long tour of South America that concluded with an exhibition at the Museo de Bellas Artes in Caracas (1969). His move to Paris the following year coincided with an exhibition of his work at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. During the seventies he reflected on mythology and the history of art and literature, borrowing figures and iconographic motifs to create a thematic world that acquired a notable significance with the inclusion of texts in his pictures. In the early seventies he alternated his artistic output with other activities: he worked with Henry Martin to publish a recording (1971), helped his brother to make the film Holidays in the Desert (1972), and took part in the publication of the book Lessons on the Reich (1974). He lived in New York for a good deal of the year, intensifying his travels in Asia and America. Following on from various isolated examples in the previous decade, in the eighties he combined his painting activities –which began to include modelling and games of perspective- with mural and architectural decoration: in monumental stained-glass windows for the Town Council of Vitry-sur-Seine (1985), frescos for the Austerlitz railway station in Paris (1987), and the façade of the Théâtre du Châtelet in Paris (1989). A retrospective exhibition was held at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 1985, followed by others in various parts of Europe: Milan (1986), Valencia (1990), Madrid (1991) and Siena (1994). In 1995 he founded the Institut du Dessin-Fondation Adami in Liechtenstein, devoted to the practice and theory of drawing.