Adami, Valerio

The artist Valerio Adami is considered the most famous Italian representative of Pop Art and is often classified in the category of Narrative Figuration. He currently lives and works in Paris, Monaco and on Lake Maggiore. Adami studied art in Milan at the age of 16 and shortly thereafter encountered artists such as Kokoschka and Matta. Before moving to Paris in 1955, he studied drawing at the Academy of Fine Arts in Bologna.
 

Adami's early paintings often dealt with ruins of buildings from the war. His style was inspired by expressionism. Thus he worked predominantly with a two-dimensional application of color and black contours. Adami opened his first solo exhibition in Milan as early as 1957. After publishing the book "Das Reich" with Helmut Heisenbüttel, he travelled through India, the USA and to Israel. In 1986, the Centre Pompidou in Paris honored Adami's work in a major retrospective.
 

Adami became known for his works that depict historical, mythological and surrealist scenes. Using stylized contours and areas of color, he creates a comic-like atmosphere. Many of his pictures refer to themes from politics, literature, music and mythology, others deal with European culture and public places. These themes, often treated critically by Adami, attracted great interest from many well-known writers, so that Italo Calvino, Octavio Paz and Jacques Derrida, among others, wrote about him. Today, his works can be admired in museums such as the Centre Pompidou, the Museo d'Arte Moderna in Rome, and the Museum of Modern Art in New York.