Valerio Adami — À propos — Slash Paris

Valerio Adami, a remarkably precocious artist, trained in the traditional style of neo-classical drawing at the Brera Academy before a lifechanging encounter at the tender age of 16: Oscar Kokoschka, whose Prometheus he discovered at the Venice Biennale, taught him the psychological dimension and intellectual power of painting. A keen traveller, Adami left Italy in 1955 and moved between London, Paris, New York, building a dazzling career which, as early as 1964, earned him the honour of featuring in the Kassel Documenta and a first retrospective of his work in 1970 at the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris. Reflecting his enjoyment of the company of poets and writers (such as Italo Calvino, Jacques Derrida, Michel Deguy, Carlos Fuentes, Edouard Glissant, Jean-Luc Nancy and Antonio Tabucchi), he keeps a journal of aphorisms where he notes down his thoughts about the structure of his drawings and paintings, since his work is the fruit of a subtle analysis combining knowledge, memory and emotions.