Valerio Adami is one of the greatest Italian painters of the post-World War II period and a central figure in contemporary European art. Born in Bologna in 1935 to a cultured and cosmopolitan family, he grew up between Emilia and Milan, where he studied at the Brera Academy under Achille Funi, a master of Italian classicism. After a pivotal trip to Paris in 1955, Adami came into contact with the surrealist and post-cubist movement, influenced by artists such as Wifredo Lam, Roberto Matta, and Francis Picabia.
In the 1960s, he developed a distinctive, personal style, marked by thick black outlines and flat fields of color. This language, at first glance similar to comics or Pop Art, is nevertheless distinguished by an unprecedented conceptual and symbolic density: each painting is an enigmatic narrative construction, in which autobiographical, historical, philosophical, and mythological elements coexist in complex balances. His images, suspended between figure and architecture, memory and invention, question the status of the image in the contemporary era.
Adami's painting has often been described as "literary," not only for the presence of texts and quotations, but for the depth of thought that underlies it. A collaborator and friend of some of the most important philosophers and writers of the twentieth century—including Jacques Derrida, Italo Calvino, Roland Barthes, Gilles Deleuze—he used painting as a tool to interrogate the concepts of identity, time, speech, and representation. Barthes wrote that "the narrative in his paintings does not conclude, it insinuates itself, as if the image thought without speaking."
In the 1970s and 1980s, his work took on an international scope. He exhibited in major European and American museums, participated in Documenta in Kassel, and represented Italy at the 1968 Venice Biennale. His works entered prestigious public collections in France, Germany, the United States, Israel, and Latin America. At the same time, he developed a significant graphic and mural practice, creating monumental works in Tel Aviv, Caracas, Milan, and Paris.
In recent decades, Adami has continued to produce highly intense pictorial cycles—from Travels to Mythological Interiors, from Metamorphoses to Political Portraits—alternating large-scale canvases with drawing and theoretical reflection. Far from being a trend, he has built a coherent, rigorous, and profoundly intellectual career, using painting as a critical and philosophical tool.
Today he lives and works between Paris, Monte Carlo, and Meina on Lake Maggiore, continuing to exhibit in major museums and foundations. His works have recently been the subject of institutional retrospectives, confirming his role as one of the great interpreters of European modern painting.
