Valerio Adami

* 1935 in Bologna, Italy

Adami was born in Bologna in 1936. At the age of ten, he began to study painting under the instruction of Felice Carena. He was accepted into the Brera Academy in 1951, and there studied as a draughtsman until 1954 in the studio of Achille Funi. In 1955 he went to Paris, where he met and was influenced by Roberto Matta and Wifredo Lam. His first solo exhibition came in 1959 in Milan. In his early career, Adami's works were expressionistic, but by the time of his second exhibition in 1964 at Kassel, he had developed a style of painting reminiscent of French cloisonnism, featuring regions of flat color bordered by black lines. Adami's subjects were highly stylized and often presented in fragments. In the 1970s, Adami began to address politics in his art, and incorporated subject matter such as modern European history, literature, philosophy, and mythology. In 1975, the philosopher Jacques Derrida devoted a long essay, +R: Into the Bargain, to Adami's work, using an exhibition of Adami's drawings as a pretext to discuss the function of "the letter and the proper name in painting".