“Valerio Adami: Painter of Concepts” is a retrospective of the artist Valerio Adami (b. Bologna, 1935), celebrating sixty-five years of profession and analysis by one of many main Italian post-war artists.

The exhibition is promoted by Comune di Milano – Cultura and initiated by Palazzo Reale in collaboration with the Valerio Adami Archive, with patronage from the Italian Cultural Institute of Paris. Curated by Marco Meneguzzo, with common coordination by Valeria Cantoni Mamiani, president of the Valerio Adami Archive. The exhibition options over seventy massive work and about fifty drawings, from 1957 to 2023, representing a number of the most vital works of the Artist. A painter esteemed worldwide, Valerio Adami completely embodies the concept of a global artist open to all influences derived from different cultures, their literature, philosophy, and music.

Educated in Milan, at Brera, with Achille Funi, Adami shortly understood the significance of partaking with a global atmosphere. His travels, all the time within the firm of his spouse Camilla Cantoni Mamiani, started with the standard “pilgrimage” to Paris at a really younger age and this journey by no means ceased: London, New York, Mexico Metropolis, Athens, Cuba, India, Caracas, Milan, however above all Paris (the place he spent his winters) and Meina (on the shores of Lake Maggiore, his present residence, the place he moved his studio each summer season) are simply a few of his most well-liked locations. These are areas the place Adami settled, typically opening a studio, for the time needed to find and permit himself to be “contaminated” by the native tradition, thanks additionally to private encounters with writers, musicians, and intellectuals.

Adami’s portray, which from the very starting typically presents itself in massive codecs, has been unmistakable because the mid-sixties because of the encounter between these distinctive indicators of pop artwork—such because the black line, vivid and flat colors, decisive traits, and concrete topics—and the fixed referencing of custom and classicism—which narrates myths and legends in a relentless figuration that rediscovers the human physique, albeit disassembled—in an period dominated by Summary artwork, Arte Povera, and Conceptual artwork.

His portray, the truth is, critically engages with its personal time and, if within the sixties it experiences a primary season of notoriety inside the pop artwork motion, already within the early seventies it detaches from it, accentuating its “literary” vocation, wealthy in each visible and verbal citations, more and more current in his work to incorporate him among the many main exponents of at the moment the French “narrative figuration” with which, as soon as once more, he solely partially identifies.

Behind instantly readable pictures lies a deeper narrative—Adami’s works are populated with refined visible metaphors and comprise philosophical, literary, and mythological ideas, representing the evolution of Western thought.

The foundational myths of European tradition, its authors, and their tales grow to be the just about unique topics of his work, with out forgetting sure unique narratives that nonetheless belong to the Western worldview. This concentrated focus, over time, has allowed him to deeply have interaction with a number of the most necessary intellectuals and writers of the twentieth century, akin to: Octavio Paz, Italo Calvino, Jacques Derrida, Luciano Berio, Antonio Tabucchi, and Jean-François Lyotard.

Though Adami is understood for the colourful colors of his narratives, drawing is the true key to understanding his work. It’s the place to begin of each portray, the middle of his creative considering, the “nulla dies sine linea” (no day with out a line), as a result of it permits one to totally grasp the connection between thought, topic, story, and phrase, which then explodes into portray. A “painter of concepts,” because the subtitle of the exhibition states, exhibiting by his works how one might be each an artist and an mental.

The exhibition “Valerio Adami: Painter of Concepts” retraces the artist’s manufacturing, organised as a chronological anthology with some important variations. The primary two rooms show works from his early days—the primary being La giostra from 1957—to the late sixties. The third room presents works from the seventies (with some indications of what’s to come back within the eighties), whereas the fourth room is organized not chronologically however typologically, that includes portraits the artist has carried out over the many years on the “noble fathers” he selected as examples of life and artwork. The next rooms are primarily devoted to the final 4 many years—deliberately predominant on this exhibition—each to reveal the fertility of Adami’s work and to proceed ideally the exhibition held in 1986 on the Centre Pompidou in Paris, which was then transferred completely that very same yr to the Palazzo Reale in Milan. Enriching the exhibition is a slender passage between the rooms “wallpapered” with the newest works—portraits that the artist has compulsively created in current months, constituting a type of expressionist “counterpoint” to his measured and calculated portray.

The exhibition can be a possibility to showcase the work of the Valerio Adami Archive, established in 2021 inside the household, which goals to reinforce, protect, promote, and defend Valerio Adami’s work, conducting analysis on every thing associated to his work and life, additionally by the brand new web site www.archiviovalerioadami.it.

Additionally featured within the exhibition is the documentary Valerio Adami, the painter of poems, produced by Artery Movie, directed by Matteo Mavero, with the participation of Valerio Adami and his pals who’re philosophers and artists. Specializing in the extra introspective a part of the artist, the documentary movie illustrates Adami’s work and life intertwined with the experiences of a number of the most influential intellectuals of the twentieth century.

Curated by
Marco Meneguzzo

at Palazzo Reale, Milan
till September 22, 2024