Valerio Adami. Ripensando la realtà. Rethinking reality

Dep Art Gallery is pleased to announce the exhibition "Valerio Adami Rethinking Reality", curated by Lorenzo Madaro. Artworks from the 1970s to the 2000s will be on display, alternating between travel scenes and paintings in which the artist rethinks lived reality, such as the majestic painting "Mnemosine machine à écrire et violon" from 1987.

The exhibition, opening on the occasion of Museo City Milano, includes a special section, created in collaboration with the Archivio Valerio Adami, and shows some of the artist's private moments and his passion for travelling, especially for boats.

Curator Lorenzo Madaro describes the artist as follows: "Cultured, ironic, sophisticated, the long and complex work of Valerio Adami has confirmed that at the heart of all his visual interests is a persistent rethinking of reality in all its philosophical, cultural, metaphysical, but also ironic and only apparently banal and everyday aspects.

Adami's research is, in fact, like a vast archive where fragments of reality meet and connect in places, roles, and surprising visions, on the one hand intimately linked to a territory of concreteness, to the physical space of painting and drawing; and on the other hand to a dreamlike dimension where bold juxtapositions ‐ of sense but also of sign ‐ create new readings to explore the boundaries of those intermediate spaces between what is tangible and what is bound to the imagination.

Sign, writing, and colour are the three paradigms around which each work has been created in the decades covered by this exhibition, from the 1970s onwards, confirming his specific orientations and, above all, his prominent role in the events of Italian and international painting history in the second half of the 20th century.

At a time dominated by the two‐dimensionality of consumer icons, in America and elsewhere, and by the obsessive use of images drawn from advertising or from the most popular and commonly used art history, Adami, in Italy (and then in his long nomadic intellectual wanderings), independently invented his own way to have painting deal with reality without falling into neo‐realist rhetoric nor the obsessive search for the banal at all costs.

The absence of pictorial nuances, and thus thanks to a refined technique that favours dense and flat backgrounds, and a palette that changes while remaining faithful to itself since his earliest accomplished works, contrasts with a new iconography that must be deciphered case by case. This is because it is the result of layers, references, and obsessive recurrences of specific places where everything coexists: high and low, mythology and an embrace, architecture and the great theme of 'painting within a painting', music and a radiator. This exhibition is therefore a journey through Adami's infinite worlds, rhythmically marked by his unmistakable stroke, which is both drawing and thought."