20th Century Italian

Considered one of Europe’s most important living artists, Valerio Adami managed to create a singular language all of his own, based on a fusion of colour and drawing in search of a new way of communicating.

Long associated with , his paintings make a particular fusion of , Futurism and, especially , whose influence is evident in his sources, ranging from cinema, comics, photography and advertising to literature, music, philosophy and the myths of Western culture.

Trained in Milan, first in the studio of the Futurist painter Achille Funi (1890-1972) and later at the Brera Academy (1951-1954), in 1957 Adami began his career as a professional artist, with a sojourn in Paris, where he consolidated his own personal figurative vocabulary based on stylised images, outlined with thick black lines on surfaces painted in intense flat colours. From the 1980s onwards he started to make large fantastic spaces that enabled him to explore eternal questions concerning beauty and ugliness, creativity and destruction, desire and sex.

A multitalented artist, he has also created stained glass windows, mural paintings, monumental frescos and stage designs. Widely acclaimed by international critics, his work is regularly shown in some of the world’s major contemporary art galleries and museums.

Over the last two decades Adami’s works have been seen in a number of retrospective and survey exhibitions, like those held in 1985 at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris and in 1990 at the Instituto Valenciano de Arte Moderno (IVAM) in Valencia.