Ille hic est Raphael (L’urne)

Valério Adami

Visconti Fine Art - Collection

Valério Adami was born in Bologna, Italy on March 17th in 1935. He developed an interest in painting at an early age, and at the young age of 16, he gets accepted to the Accademia di Brera in Milan, where he pursues his studies until 1954. At the age of 20, he already has the chance to visit Paris where he meets both Roberto Matta and Wilfredo Lam. Both of the painters encourage him to develop his talents as an artist. Between the years of 1955 and 1965, Adami constantly travels between Italy, Paris and other, mainly European cities, interrupted by brief visits to New York, South America, and India. His first one-man exhibition is held in Milan in 1959, and since then Adami has held numerous exhibitions all around the world. One of the most prominent of these was his full-scale retrospective held at the Musee National d’Art Moderne at the Pompidou Centre in Paris in 1985. Adami also realized the feature film “Holidays in the desert” together with his brother Giancarlo. In 1978/79 he creates paintings with primarily mythological themes. As of 1984, his paintings are not dated anymore. Adami has managed to evolve 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: the author James Joyce, the French Revolutionary politician Robespierre, and the composer Gustav Mahler. Adami’s art also teems with figures from the great works of literature such as the knight Don Quixote with his faithful companion, Sancho Panza and the young Prince Hamlet preoccupied with gloomy thoughts of suicide outside Kronborg Castle in Elsinore. Visconti Fine Art has collaborated with Adami on various occasions, both through Editions and at various art fairs, where Adami was exhibited, around the world. One of these Editions is the SPORT AND ART, which was initiated in 1991 between Fascination “The Gallery of Modern Art” in Switzerland and Visconti Fine Art. Five internationally renowned artists, one of them being Valerio Adami (Italy) have created a limited edition of artworks, especially for SPORT AND ART.