Dep Art Gallery dedicates an exhibition to Valerio Adami

Milan’s Dep Art Gallery delves into the art of Valerio Adami(Bologna, 1935) with the exhibition Valerio Adami Rethinking Reality, an exhibition curated by Lorenzo Madaro that brings together works created between the 1970s and 2000s. The exhibition, which opens on March 6, 2025 on the occasion of Museo City Milano and concludes on May 17, recounts the artist’s connection with travel and memory, between dreamlike suggestions and reflections on reality. The exhibition is organized around a selection of paintings that show Adami’s distinctive approach to painting: a synthesis of sign, color and narrative that is developed through an unmistakable stylistic signature. Prominent among the works on display is Mnemosine machine à écrire et violon (1987), a large-scale work in which the concept of memory becomes central, combining elements of everyday life with symbolic and cultural references.

Alongside the paintings, an important section created in collaboration with theArchivio Valerio Adami presents documents, photographs and materials that offer a never-before-seen look at the artist’s private dimension, with a focus on his passion for travel and boats. Adami’s art is placed in an autonomous position in relation to the great movements of the second half of the twentieth century. In an era dominated by Pop Art and the obsessive repetition of images related to advertising and consumption, the artist elaborates a personal path. He avoids both neorealist rhetoric and the exaltation of the banal, creating instead a layered pictorial imagery where mythology and everyday life, architecture and music, bodies and objects coexist. A central element of his poetics is the concept of the picture within the picture, a reflection on painting itself that emerges in many of his works.

“Cultured, ironic, sophisticated, Valerio Adami’s long and complex work has reaffirmed that at the core of all his visual interest is a persistent rethinking of reality in all its philosophical, cultural, metaphysical, but also ironic and only seemingly trivial and everyday aspects,” says curator Lorenzo Madaro.

Notes on the artist

Valerio Adami was born in Bologna in 1935 and trained at the Brera Academy, where he studied drawing under Achille Funi. From the early 1960s he developed a personal language, which led him to exhibit in prestigious spaces. In 1964 he was present with a solo room at Documenta 3 in Kassel, one of the most important events in contemporary art. In the following years his works are exhibited in institutions such as the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1970) and the Centre Pompidou (1985). His career is marked by continuous research and a life as a nomadic intellectual. He travels between London and Paris, but also to Latin America, India, Israel and Cuba, coming into contact with key figures in twentieth-century culture such as Jacques Derrida, Saul Steinberg and Richard Lindner. Over the years he participated several times in the Venice Biennale (1968, 1986), consolidating his role in the international art scene. His painting, characterized by a sharp mark and a vibrant color palette, moves between literary and philosophical evocations, posing as an ongoing reflection on the relationship between image and thought. After decades spent between different European cities, since 2023 Adami has returned to live permanently in Italy, settling in his home-studio in Meina, on Lake Maggiore.

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Dep Art Gallery dedicates an exhibition to Valerio Adami

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