VALERIO ADAMI* (born 1935 in Bologna)
Untitled
color lithography/paper, 64,8 x 49,8 cm
signed Adami

ESTIMATE °€ 60 - 100
STARTING PRICE °€ 60

Valerio Adami is an Italian artist. His paintings show influences from Pop Art, of which he is considered the internationally best-known Italian representative. In France it is classified as narrative figuration. Adami began working with Felice Carena's paintings in 1945. On the recommendation of Oskar Kokoschka, he began studying at the Accademia di Brera in Milan in 1951, where he focused primarily on classical drawing in the class of the neo-classicist Achille Funi. In 1955 he moved to Paris, where he was influenced by Roberto Matta and Wifredo Lam. Adami had his first solo exhibition in Milan in 1959. In 1962 he married Camilla, like him a graduate of the Brera Academy. Adami's artistic development began with expressive works in the style of comic strips. Around the time of his participation in documenta III in 1964, he developed his own painting style that has reminiscences of French Cloisonism. Based on a precisely transferred preparatory drawing, Adami designs each painting as a system of closed black outlines, each of which delimits monochromatic areas (aplats). In 1965 he took part in the exhibition La Figuration Narrative in Paris, which established this French response to Pop Art. In the late 1960s he created a series of images with socially critical urban motifs in the Chelsea Hotel in New York, with which he represented Italy at the Venice Biennale in 1968. Carlos Fuentes wrote the catalog text. He traveled to Cuba, Mexico and Venezuela and increasingly focused on political and contemporary historical topics. In 971 he made the film “Vacances dans le Desert” with his brother Giancarlo. The German poet Helmut Heissenbuettel created the book “Das Reich” with ten lithographs on German history in Munich in 1974. After a series of allegorical portraits of pioneers of modernity (e.g. Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Walter Benjamin), Adami's painting opened up to Western intellectual history and mythology from the mid-1970s onwards. In 1977 he took part in 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 responded 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 College 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 is intended not only to maintain his artistic legacy, but also to research and teach the cultural technique of drawing. The first retrospective was shown in 1970 at the Musee d’art moderne de la Ville de Paris. On his fiftieth birthday in 1985, the Musee National d'Art Moderne honored him with a large retrospective, which was then shown at the Palazzo Reale in Milan. Further museum retrospectives followed in Valencia, Tokyo, Tel Aviv, Siena, Bochum, Buenos Aires, Florence, Athens, Locarno, Miami, Ravenna, Turin, Mantua, Perpignan and Vienna. Adami's works include: at the Museum of modern Art New York and at the Center Georges-Pompidou Paris. Adami has realized various works in public spaces. The most famous are the painting in the foyer of the Theâtre 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 wide audience through the feature film Lost in Translation which was shot there. In 1993, the Scottish distillery Mcallan commissioned Adami to design a label for a rare whiskey from a barrel from 1926. "The Mcallan 1926 Adami" achieved the world record of the most expensive bottle at auction several times.

PLEASE NOTE:
The purchase price consists of the highest bid plus the buyer's premium, sales tax and, if applicable, the fee of artists resale rights. In the case of normal taxation (marked °), a premium of 24% is added to the highest bid. The mandatory sales tax of 13%, for photographs 20%, is added to the sum of the highest bid and the buyer's premium. The buyer's premium amounts to 28% in case of differential taxation. The sales tax is included in the differential taxation.