Exhibition · Tribeca
David Nolan Gallery's New Tribeca Space, NYC, Opens With Valerio Adami's 1960s Work
Italian painter Valerio Adami returns to New York after roughly two decades with Alice in the Land of Violence, the first show in David Nolan Gallery's new Tribeca home. It focuses on 1960s paintings and drawings and closes October 24.
David Nolan Gallery has moved to 74 Leonard Street in Tribeca, and it opened the new space with Alice in the Land of Violence, a show of work by the Italian painter Valerio Adami. It runs September 9 to October 24, so only a couple of days remain. It is Adami's first New York exhibition in roughly twenty years.
According to Hyperallergic, the show has 16 paintings and 15 drawings. All but one date from 1962 to 1967. The exception is "Hotel Pulitzer," finished this year by the 91-year-old artist. The gallery frames the 1960s pieces as the period before Adami settled into his signature hard-edged, graphic style. It describes them as raw and exuberant, moving between fantasy and reality and drawing on postwar fashion, automobiles and commercial culture.
Adami was born in Bologna in 1935 and moved to Paris in 1955, where he became close to Roberto Matta and Wifredo Lam. A 1962 trip to London brought him into conversation with Richard Hamilton, among others, and introduced comic-book onomatopoeia and contemporary music into his work. On his first New York trip in the mid-1960s he stayed at the Chelsea Hotel and befriended Allen Ginsberg and Saul Steinberg. The gallery says the city's underground writers, poets and musicians drew him, not its Pop scene.
Two themes run through the decade. Hotel rooms recur as sites of psychological tension; Adami said he painted in them for years because the anonymity let him reinvent the studio. Cars are the other thread. He enrolled in Pietro Taruffi's high-speed driving school in 1963 and often gave works titles that evoke an engine's sound. Works on view include "Auto-lavaggio (Car Wash)" from 1964, "Blam" from 1962, "Toys" and "Il miraggio" from 1965, and the 1963 canvas that gives the show its title. Many of the drawings are pencil on paper, some with watercolor or tempera.
Adami has long rejected the Pop label that his flat, saturated color and black outlines invite, and places his work within Narrative Figuration, rooted in literature, psychoanalysis and philosophical inquiry. The gallery notes that his murals and large public works have been realized around the world, from Paris to Tokyo.
