Milano 20123
Italy
The Valerio Adami Archive announces the launch of work on the online general catalogue of Valerio Adami’s oeuvre. The project, promoted by the Archive and entrusted to the scientific direction of Lorenzo Madaro, is dedicated in this first phase to works created between 1958 and 1978, with the goal of being completed by December 2027. The project arises from the need to re-examine, document and recover, through rigorous philological methods and an updated historical-critical perspective, a decisive season in the artist’s path. It runs from the years of training and his first independent works to the full definition of a language that is instantly recognizable and that traversed the second half of the twentieth century, in Europe, South America, Asia and beyond, constantly shifting in style, registers and visual tone without losing its deepest identity.
“Initiating work on Valerio Adami’s general catalogue is an adventure that takes us all over the world where he worked and collaborated with important public and private institutions” declares Valeria Cantoni Mamiani, President of the Adami Archive and the artist’s niece. “Since 1958, when he was a promising young artist, throughout all the years of his life and work, Adami created thousands of works which in 2021 we decided to gather in a digital archive in view of the general catalogue that is taking shape as an exceptional corpus documenting the evolution of his thinking about drawing and of his practice. The online platform makes it possible to study his artistic paths and relationships with the different worlds he lived in and encountered throughout his life. For me, it is a daily reminder of what it means to be free in thought and form.”
For Lorenzo Madaro: “Valerio Adami’s online general catalogue is created to reconstruct, with method and critical perspective, the fabric of a mobile, stratified work resistant to any formula: a line of research that recognizes drawing as the original place of the pictorial thought of a master in twentieth-century art history and of our own time.”
The catalogue will be published online through a platform conceived as a space for study, consultation and progressive updating. The digital choice corresponds to the nature of a project of such breadth, designed to accommodate verification, additions, new documentary acquisitions, iconographic materials, provenances, bibliographic and exhibition references. For an artist whose story developed across multiple geographies, international cultural contexts and a dense network of intellectual relationships, the online format makes it possible to build an ever-evolving map of his work, fostering the circulation of knowledge among scholars, curators, institutions, collectors, galleries and new generations of researchers.
The Archive therefore invites collectors, public and private institutions, foundations, museums, galleries and anyone owning works by Valerio Adami—paintings, drawings, watercolors and materials connected to his production—to report them so they may be examined, documented and, where deemed appropriate, included in the scientific cataloguing process. Every report, including photographic documentation of his exhibitions and travels, may contribute to reconstructing the artist’s corpus, defining the circulation of works, verifying provenance and understanding their exhibition and collecting history, outlining as broad and rigorous a documentary horizon as possible.
Alongside the catalogue, within the same research project, Lorenzo Madaro, art historian and professor of Contemporary Art History at the Brera Academy of Fine Arts (Milan), is working on a scientific monograph dedicated to the first twenty years of Valerio Adami’s artistic activity. The book will examine the period between 1958 and 1978, tracing the genesis of his language, his relationship with the Italian and international cultural climate, his first exhibitions, intellectual relationships, transformations of the image and the affirmation of an autonomous position within the painting of the second half of the twentieth century. The monograph will serve as a parallel and complementary critical tool to the platform, capable of restoring the historical weight of a foundational twenty-year period and rereading it in light of the most recent research.
