We are happy to present a selection of works by the Italian painter Valerio Adami for the first time at our gallery in Stockholm.
Siwert Bergström arranged a rendezvous with Adami in Paris in the mid 1980s. They met in his studio and home, which had previously belonged to the artist Salvador Dalí, close to the church of Sacré-Coeur, to discuss art and a future collaboration. They stayed in touch and in 1989 Galleri GKM showed Adami’s paintings for the first time. In conjunction with the exhibition, the gallery also published a book about the artist’s work, accompanied by poems by Lasse Söderberg and a text on Adami written by Alain Jouffroy. This was the start of a long collaboration which resulted in several exhibitions and editions of graphic works.
Valerio Adami, born in Bologna in 1935 developed an interest for drawing and painting at an early age. Following studies at Accademia di Brera in Milan, Valerio Adami made his first trip to Paris in 1955 where he met with the painters Roberto Matta and Wilfredo Lam, who inspired him and encouraged him to develop his talents.
During his creative career he has evolved his own iconography, an ingenious pictorial language that embraces both past and present, and within whose frontiers strange creatures keep company with famous faces from history and literature.
Since his first one-man exhibition in Milan in 1959 Adami has had numerous exhibitions around the world, and today his works hang in many museums of modern art as well as in private collections. In 1985 he was the subject of a full-scale retrospective at the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, where a representative selection of his production was on show. In 1989, to commemorate the bicentennial of the French Revolution, he was commissioned to produce a monumental mural for the Théàtre du Châtelet in Paris.
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