Valerio Adami

New works
23.5. – 18.6.2008

Valerio Adami, born in Bologne in 1935, studied painting at the Brera Academy in Milan. His works are shown in important international museums and galleries. The documenta in Kassel and the Venice Biennale have devoted rooms to his work. Adami lives and works in Paris, Monte Carlo and on Lake Maggiore. Extended trips and intense friendships with numerous artists and intellectuals form his life and his work.

His works contain impulses of Surrealism, Pittura Metafisica, and Pop art as well as of comics and photography. His paintings, constructed with their clear contours and solid areas of colour, have developed their own pictorial vocabulary. These kaleidoscopic obfuscations, which reflect the artist’s specific question, are characterized by breaks and irony such that one can speak of a sober metaphysics of the modern. At the same time Adami is, in all sobriety, an artists’ scholar who reflects the suffering and horror of his time. Differentiated relationships to history and art history, music and psychology, literature, philosophy and mythology underlie his works.

A catalogue was published on the occasion of the exhibition.