Valerio Adami

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Valerio Adami (1995)

Valerio Adami (born March 17, 1935 in Bologna ) is an Italian painter who lives and works in Paris , Monaco and Meina on Lake Maggiore . His painting shows the influences of Pop Art , the internationally best-known Italian representative of which he is considered to be. In his adopted country of France, he is assigned to the narrative figuration .

Life

Adami began to paint Felice Carena in 1945 . On the recommendation of Oskar Kokoschka , he began studying at the Accademia di Brera in Milan in 1951 . In the class of the neo-classicist Achille Funi , he mainly dealt with classical drawing until 1954 . In 1955 he moved to Paris, where he was artistically influenced by Roberto Matta and Wifredo Lam . Adami had his first solo exhibition in Milan in 1959. In 1962 he married Camilla as he was a graduate of the Brera Academy.

Adami's artistic development began with expressive works in the style of comic strips . Around the time he took part in documenta III in Kassel in 1964 , he developed his own style of painting, reminiscent of French cloisonism . On the basis of a precisely transferred preparatory drawing, Adami designs each painting as a system of closed black outlines, each of which delimits monochrome areas ( aplats ). In 1965 he took part in the exhibition La Figuration Narrative in Paris , which established this French response to Anglo-Saxon Pop Art. In the late 1960s he worked on a large series of images at the Chelsea Hotel in New York City with socially critical urban motifs, with which he represented Italy at the 1968 Venice Biennale . Carlos Fuentes wrote the catalog text . Politicized by the revolutionary events of 1967/1968, he traveled to Cuba , Mexico and Venezuela and subsequently turned increasingly to political and contemporary issues. In 1971 he made the film " Vacances dans le Désert " with his brother Giancarlo . With the German poet Helmut Heissenbüttel , the book “ Das Reich ” was created in Munich in 1974 with a long poem and ten lithographs on German history between 1914 and 1945. After a series of allegorical portraits, important pioneers of modernism (for example Friedrich Nietzsche , Sigmund Freud , Walter Benjamin ), his painting opened up to Western intellectual history and mythology from the mid-1970s . In 1977 he took part in a documenta for a second time , documenta 6 in the drawing department.

Recognized by critics as a paradigm of a postmodern position in painting, Adami's work has often been the subject of philosophical reflection, notably by Jacques Derrida , Gilles Deleuze , Jean-François Lyotard , Jean Luc Nancy , Michel Onfray , Hubert Damisch , and Paolo Fabbri . Many contemporary poets have reacted to Adami's “literary painting” with their own texts, such as Italo Calvino , Carlos Fuentes , Octavio Paz and Antonio Tabucchi .

Adami is a member of the Collège international de philosophie and commander of the Legion of Honor .

In 2005 he founded the Fondazione europea del disegno - Fondation Adami in Meina, Italy . The foundation should not only look after his artistic legacy, but especially research and teach the cultural technique of drawing, understood in its broadest sense as a 'design of a thing'.

A first retrospective of his work was shown in 1970 at the Musée d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris . On his fiftieth birthday in 1985, the Musée National d'Art Moderne honored him - with a major retrospective, which was subsequently shown at the Palazzo Reale in Milan . Since then, other museum retrospectives have followed his work, for example in Valencia , Tokyo , Tel Aviv , Siena , Bochum , Buenos Aires , Florence , Athens , Locarno , Miami , Ravenna , Turin , Mantua , Perpignan , Vienna .

Adami's works are represented in many important museums, such as the Museum of Modern Art New York and the Center Georges-Pompidou Paris .

Adami has realized various works in public space. The best known are the painting in the foyer of the Théâtre du Châtelet and the two monumental paintings in the station hall of the Gare d'Austerlitz in Paris . His decorative images in the New York Grill on the 52nd floor of the Park Hyatt Hotel in Tokyo became known to a worldwide audience through the film Lost in Translation .

After many years of cooperation with the Galerie Maeght , later Maeght-Lelong , and a few years at the Marlborough Gallery Adami is from the Paris gallery since 2004 Daniel Templon and Galerie Haas Zurich and Galerie Michael Haas Berlin represented.

Quotes:

  • "If I want to make a blob, I'll draw it."
  • "A painting is above all a system to hold memories."

literature

  • documenta III . International exhibition. Catalog: Volume 1: Painting and Sculpture. Volume 2: Hand drawings, industrial design, graphics. Kassel, Cologne 1964.
  • documenta 6 : Catalog: Volume 1: Painting, sculpture / environment, performance. Volume 2: photography, film, video. Volume 3: Hand drawings, utopian design, books. Kassel 1977, ISBN 3-920453-00-X .
  • Adami. By Hubert Damisch and Henri Martin. Maeght, Paris, 1974. Bruckmann, Munich 1974
  • Adami. Center Georges Pompidou, Paris, 1985. Publishing house Die Galerie, Frankfurt am Main 1986

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Adami, Valerio
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Italian painter
DATE OF BIRTH March 17, 1935
PLACE OF BIRTH Bologna , Italy