Adami valero biography graphic organizer
Home / Biography Templates & Examples / Adami valero biography graphic organizer
Places. After graduation in 1955 he traveled to Paris, where he met artists Roberto Matta and Wifredo Lam, both of whom would remain creative influences over Adami throughout his career.
By now the young artist's style was greatly partial to the Abstract Expressionist genre, at its peak in the mid 1950s. In France, he exhibited together with his wife Camilla at the Espace Jacques Villeglé in Saint Gratien.
In 2019 an exhibition of his paintings was held at the Galerie Daniel Templon in Paris, and from November 2024 to January of 2025 the Templon Gallery in Brussels held an exhibition of his most recent paintings, titled "Narrations." He continues to work and live in Paris and Lake Maggiore.
See a list of available inventory for Valerio Adami
Born in March 1935, this major painter of Narrative Figuration, is famous for his flat areas of acidic colors and his sharp shapes contoured by a thick black line, which he meticulously spreads on the canvas like a comic book.
Italian by origin and Parisian by adoption, the first drawings of his childhood were those of Milan in ruins in the wake of the war.
After an introduction to painting in Felice Carena's studio in Venice, where he also met Oskar Kokoschka, he studied at the Academy of Fine Arts in Milan.
He came out with a style strongly marked by Matta's surrealism, which would characterize the works presented at his first solo exhibition in 1957.
His life was later divided between France and Italy, while he developed his Figurative Language between two trips to India and Cuba.
The themes of consumer society, women, history, history, literature, literature, music and poetry gradually seep into his painting, characterized by fragmented surfaces that are entirely saturated with bright colors.
During the 1960s and 1970s, Valerio Adami evolved in the circles of Narrative Figuration and New Realism, with which he shared the same political commitment and the same attachment to the representation of reality.
Shortly after he moved to Paris in 1970, the Museum of Modern Art devoted an exhibition to him, followed, in 1985, by the Pompidou Center, then the Grand Palais (exhibition “La Figuration Narrative”, 2008).
To date, Valerio Adami is being talked about all over the world.
In London, together with his friend Romagnoni, with whom he shared both a studio and a passion for Anglo-Saxon culture—which had been entirely erased in Italy by Fascist rhetoric—he came into contact with the London avant-garde (including Francis Bacon and William Scott), influencing Adami's future work. In 2000, in Meina, the city where the master lives today, the European Foundation of Drawing was established in the restored Villa Faraggiana Museum.
BIOGRAPHY
Valerio Adami was born in Bologna on March 17, 1935. Even though I have written texts, what matters to me is drawing. Meanwhile, the human figure became increasingly prominent in his painting: no longer just bodies among objects, in interior decor, or public spaces.
In 2018, the Jean Cocteau Museum in Menton paid tribute to Valerio Adami with the exhibition "Adami: Lines of Life." In 2019, Adami's 1980s works were the focus of an exhibition at the Galerie Templon in Paris. In 1994, Adami installed four large paintings at the New York Grill & Bar of the Park Hyatt Hotel in Tokyo.
Valerio Adami has traveled extensively throughout his long career and has frequently spent several months in places, such as New York City, Los Angeles, Mexico and South America, India, Sri Lanka, Japan, Israel, Northern Europe, Ostend and Monte Carlo.
And he alone.”
Valerio Adami
These travels and encounters, which he experienced with his wife Camilla Cantoni Mamiani, whom he married in 1962, profoundly influenced Valerio Adami's culture and artistic vision. From then on, he spent summers with Camilla at Villa Cantoni, the large house-falansterio in Arona, which became a meeting place for artists of the time. His works often addressed themes closely linked to the cultures of the countries he visited.
Among his intellectual circle were writer Carlos Fuentes, philosopher Jacques Derrida, and painters Saul Steinberg, Richard Lindner, Matta, Octavio Paz, Italo Calvino, and Luciano Berio. The human figure as a whole much rather than just body fragments became the focal point of his works. In 2006, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Lissone awarded Adami a lifetime achievement prize and hosted a major retrospective titled "Adami after Adami." In 2009, together with his wife Camilla, he inaugurated the retrospective "Camilla ADAMI Valerio" at the Palazzo della Promotrice in Turin.
In 1976, he embarked on his first trip to India with his friend and art critic Hubert Damisch, staying for a long time in Ahmedabad, home of Gandhi's ashram. Following the urban spaces and interiors of the 1960s were referential yet enigmatic paintings that juxtaposed letters and phrases with the depicted image. The stimulus for his art was the real world as an alternative draft to an artistic ivory tower: “To clarify and give order to the way we represent the real world in which we live… To make use of everyday language, the kind used by people at the café, in the supermarket… To find the concrete origin of the most intimate impulses”.