Valerio Adami. Pittore di Idee

From July 17 to September 22, 2024, at the Palazzo Reale, an anthology of the artist Valerio Adami (Bologna, 1935) celebrates sixty-five years of career and research of one of the greatest Italian artists of the Postwar period.

The exhibition is promoted by the Municipality of Milan – Culture and produced by the Royal Palace with the Valerio Adami Archive, under the patronage of the Italian Cultural Institute of Paris.

Curated by Marco Meneguzzo, with the general coordination of Valeria Cantoni Mamiani, president of the Valerio Adami Archive, the exhibition presents over seventy large paintings and about fifty drawings, from 1957 to 2023, among the most significant works of the Master. Valerio Adami, a painter esteemed worldwide, perfectly embodies the idea of the international artist open to all influences from other languages, such as literature, philosophy, and music.

Trained in Milan, at Brera, with Achille Funi, he quickly understood the importance of engaging in an international environment. His travels, always accompanied by his wife Camilla Cantoni Mamiani, began with the traditional "pilgrimage" to Paris at a very young age and never ended: London, New York, Mexico City, Athens, Cuba, India, Caracas, Milan, but especially Paris (where he spent winters) and Meina (on the shores of Lake Maggiore, his current home, where he moved every summer) are just some of his chosen places. These are places where Adami settled, often opening a studio, for the time needed to discover and let himself be "contaminated" by the local culture, also thanks to personal encounters with writers, musicians, and intellectuals.

Adami's painting, which from the beginning often presents itself in large formats, is unmistakable since the mid-1960s due to the encounter between those distinctive signs of pop art – such as the black line, bright and flat colors, decisive traits, and urban subjects – and the constant reference to tradition and classicism – which narrates myths and legends in a constant figuration that recovers the human body, albeit disassembled – in an era dominated by Abstractism, Arte Povera, and Conceptual Art.

Indeed, his painting critically engages with its time, and if in the 1960s it lives a first season of notoriety within the pop art movement, already by the early 1970s it detaches from it, accentuating its so-called "literary" vocation, rich in both visual and word-related citations, increasingly present in his work until including him among the major exponents of that French "Figuration narrative" with which, once again, he identifies only partially.... read the rest of the article»