Valerio Adami a Lucca – Disegno dipinti e acquerelli

From September 24 to November 12 a threefold exhibition dedicated to Valerio Adami is held in Lucca, in three different places , each presenting a different kind of works:

Drawings, Galleria Usher arte, via della Zecca 15, Lucca
from 24 September to 12 November 2011

Paintings– Claudio Poleschi Arte Contemporanea,
Chiesa di San Matteo, Piazza San Matteo 3, Lucca
from 24 September to 12 November

Watercolours, Lu.C.C.A. – Lucca Center of Contemporary Art, Via della Fratta 36
from 25 September to 23 October

Valerio Adami (Bologna 1935) starts painting in the Felice Carena’s atelier in Venice in 1945. After meeting Oskar Kokoschka in 1951, event that marks a key moment in his training, he begins to study drawing with Achille Funi at the Brera Academy. After the first exhibitions of 1958, at the Institute of Contemporary Art in London and at the Naviglio in Milan, he lives a wandering life often reported in his biographies. He travels Europe, especially in Paris, and he exhibits in major museums around the world, in New York (1966), in Latin America and in the East, meeting artists, musicians, writers and intellectuals in a long season of friendship and exchanges of experiences.
After an initial phase dominated by the existential onset (the informal, Francis Bacon, the gestural painting and the late surrealism), the artist feels the urge for a personal but objective output, from the residual post-war expressionism, and from superficial exteriority of the languages of the masses. In fact, the new story that Adami brings into play from the ’60s, relating to English and American pop art, is a constant and gradual process of translation and simplification, of deconstruction and reassembly, from the private world of phenomenological objectivity to the drawn and painted image. In the final painting the line still marks the color field, almost like the structure of lead on medieval stained glass windows. Through this process of freezing, as bright as melancholy, Adami seems to question the actual connection between art and truth, reality and language.
The artist participates in major international exhibitions, including the Documenta in Kassel in 1964 and the Venice Biennale in 1968. Since 1990 he lives in Paris, Monte Carlo and Meina, on Lake Maggiore.