Valerio Adami

Bolonia, 1935

Valerio Adami (born 17 March 1935) is an Italian painter. Educated at the Accademia di Brera in Milan, he has since worked in both London and Paris. His art is influenced by Pop Art.

Adami was born in Bologna. 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).

In the 1970s, Adami began to address politics in his art, and incorporated...