Biography
Valerio Adami completes his training course in Milan. In 1955 he graduated from the Brera Academy under the guidance of Achille Funi and in the same year he held his first solo exhibition at the Pater Gallery in Milan. In 1958 he spent the winter in London with his friend Bepi Romagnoni where he discovered a culture largely unknown in Italy at that time. During the 1960s, he gradually abandoned the painting of the early years and built his own language around the iconography of comics. During this period he participated in numerous group shows, exhibiting not only in Italy but also in London, Paris and New York, cities in which he regularly stays. In 1986 the city of Geneva entrusted him with the scenography of the celebratory show of the Calvinist reform, which was followed by the commissions in recent years of the scenes of Wagner’s flying Dutchman at the San Carlo Theater in Naples (2003) and the curtain created for Les Ballets de Monte-Carlo (2011). In the last decades of his activity Adami continues his career as a painter continuously, carries out his work between Italy and France and occupies an important role in promoting artistic research. In Adami’s proliferating work there are numerous interferences with the literary genre. In addition to the series inaugurated in 1966 Literary Portraits – a sequence of symbolic portraits of various writers and thinkers – the works Le Dessinateur, performed for the novel L’orologica by Jean-Clarance Lambert (published on the cover of the Turin edition, Geiger, 1976) and La terra promessa, inspired by the verses of Ungaretti (published in «La Lettura», n. 3, 27 November 2011). Adami’s work also inspired many first-rate intellectuals of the twentieth century; such as Jacques Dupin, Octavio Paz, Jean-Luc Nancy and Jacques Derrida, with whom Adami also created the affiche for the opera Glas. Among the most recent editions we remember the volume The headaches of the Minotaur by Antonio Tabucchi (Milan, Skira, 2000).