Skip to main content
Want more images or videos?
Request additional images or videos from the seller
1 of 6

Valerio Adami
Coltelli

1976

About the Item

Dated: 19 Januari 1976. (19.1.76) Artwork size: 48×36 cm. Frame size: 65×52 cm. Frame in white gold. Free shipment worldwide. Signed,titled and dated. Acquired directly from the artist. “Adami is the maestro of the unadulterated line,” writes the Swedish poet Lasse Söderberg in his reflection on the Italian artist, whose fame has now spread far beyond the fertile, undulating landscape of his native Bologna. After more than half a century of working creatively, Adami has evolved 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 French Revolutionary politician Robespierre, the author James Joyce and the composer Gustav Mahler. Adami’s art teems with figures from the great works of literature: a young Prince Hamlet preoccupied with gloomy thoughts of suicide outside Kronborg Castle in Elsinore, and the gaunt and grizzled knight Don Quixote with his faithful companion, Sancho Panza. Erotic motifs have been a constant theme throughout Adami’s production: women and loving couples in their most intimate moments, captured in mythically saturated shades, in evocative deep reds and a myriad shades of blue. Valerio Adami was born in Bologna in 1935 and developed an interest for drawing and painting at an early age. In 1951, at the tender age of just 16, he was accepted into the Accademia di Brera in Milan, where he studied and painted until 1954. He made his first trip to Paris in 1955, and by the age of 20 had already had the opportunity of meeting the painters Roberto Matta and Wilfredo Lam, who inspired him and encouraged him to develop his talents. Since his first one-man exhibition in Milan in 1959 Adami has had numerous exhibitions around the world, and today his works hang in many museums of modern art as well as in private collections. In 1985 he was the subject of a full-scale retrospective at the Musée National d’Art Moderne at the Pompidou Centre in Paris, where a representative selection of his production was on show. In 1989, to commemorate the bicentennial of the French Revolution, he was commissioned to produce a monumental mural for the Théàtre du Châtelet in Paris. Numerous authors have written about Adami’s art, among them Octavio Paz, Italo Calvino and Carlos Fuentes. Siwert Bergström arranged a rendezvous with Adami in Paris in the mid 1980s. They met in his studio and home, which had previously belonged to the artist Salvador Dalí, just a stone’s throw from the church of Sacré-Coeur, to discuss art and future collaboration. These contacts resulted in Galleri GKM showing Adami’s pictures for the first time in 1989. In conjunction with the exhibition, the gallery also published a book about the artist’s work, accompanied by poems by Lasse Söderberg and a text on Adami written by Alain Jouffroy.
  • Creator:
    Valerio Adami (1935, Italian)
  • Creation Year:
    1976
  • Dimensions:
    Height: 25.6 in (65 cm)Width: 20.48 in (52 cm)Depth: 1.58 in (4 cm)
  • Medium:
  • Movement & Style:
  • Period:
  • Condition:
  • Gallery Location:
    Malmo, SE
  • Reference Number:
    1stDibs: LU32815423132

More From This Seller

View All
Femme au tropique rouge
By Corneille
Located in Malmo, SE
Artwork size: 34 x 47 cm. Frame size: 53 x 65 cm. Free shipment worldwide. Signed and dated. Acquired directly from the artist. Corneille, one of the founders of the COBRA group, ha...
Category

1990s Contemporary Figurative Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Gouache

Non Violence
By Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd
Located in Malmo, SE
Artwork size: 73 x 98 cm. Frame size: 93 x 117 cm. Frame in wood silver Acquired directly from the artist. Free shipment worldwide. Carl Fredrik Reuterswärd...
Category

1980s Contemporary Figurative Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Mixed Media, Watercolor

Hommage á Léger
By Erró
Located in Malmo, SE
Artwork size: 47×38 cm Frame size: 62,5 x 51,5 cm Free shipment worldwide. Acquired directly from the artist. Signed and dated on the verso. “I paint because painting is a private ...
Category

Early 2000s Pop Art Figurative Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Watercolor

Hommage á Léger
$10,980
Free Shipping
Sawblade
By Fernandez Arman
Located in Malmo, SE
Imprint-ink on paper. Unique artwork. Artwork size: 120 x 80 cm. Frame size: 140,5 x 98,5 cm. Free shipment worldwide. Acquired directly from the artist. Framed with a silver frame ...
Category

1970s Contemporary Figurative Paintings

Materials

Paper, Ink

Sawblade
$11,558
Free Shipping
Foot Musik
By Roberto Matta
Located in Malmo, SE
Frame size 76x78 cm. Free shipment worldwide. Acquired directly from the artist. Archive number (P90/41) “The heart is an eye,” writes Nobel laureate Octavio Paz in an essay on Matta’s paintings. Matta creates a world coloured both by a sunny faith in the future and by visions of impending doom. Roberto Sebastian Echaurren Antonio Matta, who died aged 91 on 23 November 2002, was born in Santiago, Chile, on 11 November 1911 into a family with Spanish, French and Basque roots, and raised in an atmosphere of religiosity. By the age of 21 he had graduated and begun work as an architect, but his leisure time he devoted to sketching and painting. In 1933 he travelled to Europe for the first time, visiting Greece, Yugoslavia, Italy and other countries, and subsequently taking the initiative to collaborate with the architect, Le Corbusier. As time passed, however, Matta’s enthusiasm for a career in architecture waned, and he began to devote himself full-time to art, making early acquaintances with surrealists such as Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, André Breton and others. Between 1939 and 1948 Matta, like many of his artistic contemporaries, lived in self-imposed exile in the USA, but, after almost 10 years’ absence from Europe, he returned to make first Rome and then, a few years later, Paris his home. Throughout most of the rest of his life Matta commuted between his studio in Paris and his creative refuge in the monastery outside Rome. And it is here, in Italy, that he produced his greatest paintings. Matta’s first retrospective in Sweden was organised in 1956 when his works were exhibited in what was then Galerie Colibri – run by, among others, the artist C O Hultén...
Category

1990s Surrealist Drawings and Watercolor Paintings

Materials

Mixed Media, Gouache

SF 89-153.
By Sam Francis
Located in Malmo, SE
Artwork size: 67 x 51 cm. Frame size: 112 x 97 cm. Free shipment worldwide. Archive number SF 89-153 in the Sam Francis Foundation. Stamped with the Sam Francis Estate logo and stamped signature on verso. Sam Francis’s paintings are a journey into a dream, a voyage into the landscapes of the soul where colours are lights on fire. Alongside names such as Jackson Pollock, Willem de Kooning and Franz Kline, Sam Francis is an artist who has succeeded in demonstrating a total mastery of abstract expressionism’s impassioned and spontaneous genre. The explosions of colour – red, blue, green and yellow – the streaks, strokes and bold lines of his pictures are the physical synthesis of the deepest crevices of the soul. His colours create rhythmical motifs that, characteristically enough, can be called the “musicality” of his paintings. The work of Sam Francis provides a visible meeting place for the conscious and the unconscious. His pictures are the cross-fertilisation of what has already been experienced with what exists still only as desire, a struggle between melancholy and merrymaking. Influenced by C.G. Jung, the father of psychoanalysis, Sam Francis spent a large portion of his life exploring the premise that dreams, instincts and intuition provide, the keys which unlock the mysteries and meaning of our inner lives. He was also fascinated by the four ancient elements – earth, water, air and fire – which developed into a leitmotif in his work. Sam Francis was born in San Mateo in California, USA in 1923. After starting to paint at the age of around twenty, he soon found himself increasingly consumed by the power of art. He spent much of the 1950s in Paris, from where he not only made frequent excursions to a number of European cities, but also embarked on many journeys to South America and Asia. He continued to move from place to place, primarily in the USA and Japan, right up until his death in 1994. Sam Francis’s first...
Category

1980s Contemporary Abstract Paintings

Materials

Paper, Acrylic

SF 89-153.
$98,248
Free Shipping

You May Also Like

Halston and his Halstonettes, Watercolor fashion portrait on paper
By Manuel Santelices
Located in Miami Beach, FL
The artist has covered New York collections for over 16 years and has interviewed, as a journalist, several fashion designers and personalities for different publications. He loves t...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Portrait Drawings and Waterco...

Materials

Paint, Watercolor

Gucci Spring 19 Accessories. Fashion watercolor on paper
By Manuel Santelices
Located in Miami Beach, FL
The artist has covered New York collections for over 16 years and has interviewed, as a journalist, several fashion designers and personalities for different publications. He loves t...
Category

21st Century and Contemporary Contemporary Figurative Drawings and Water...

Materials

Paper, Ink, Watercolor

Out of the Sun (Under the Racetrack Grandstand), Saratoga Springs, Anne Diggory
By Anne Diggory
Located in New York, NY
Anne Diggory (b. 1951) Out of the Sun (Under the Racetrack Grandstand), 1978 Watercolor on paper 7 x 10 inches Signed and dated lower left Provenance: Ac...
Category

1970s Contemporary Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Watercolor, Pencil

Five at the Rail, View of Racetrack and Crowd, Saratoga Springs, New York
By Anne Diggory
Located in New York, NY
Anne Diggory (b. 1951) Five at the Rail, Saratoga Springs Racecourse, New York, circa 1978 Watercolor on paper 4 3/4 x 6 inches Initialed lower right: Dig...
Category

1970s Contemporary Landscape Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Watercolor

Pensando & recordando a Luis Caballero, Nude Watercolor on paper
By Celso José Castro Daza
Located in Miami Beach, FL
"Pensando & recordando a Luis Caballero" by Celso Castro-Daza From the Duchándome Series Watercolor, pastel, and ink on archival paper Sheet size: 19.5 ...
Category

2010s Contemporary Nude Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Pastel, Archival Ink, Watercolor, Archival Paper

Where will you go? Nude drawing. 2021. Paper, mixed media, 70x48 cm
Located in Riga, LV
In the recent years Maris Abilevs has been exploring the beauty of female shapes by using mixed media and various drawing techniques raging from expressive sketching to neat lines.
Category

2010s Contemporary Nude Drawings and Watercolors

Materials

Paper, Watercolor, Color Pencil

Recently Viewed

View All