Valerio Adami was born in Bologna in 1935 and developed an interest for drawing and painting at an early age. In 1951 he was accepted into the Accademia di Brera in Milan, where he studied and painted until 1954. By the age of 20 he 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.

Siwert Bergström arranged a rendezvous with Adami in Paris in the mid 1980s. 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.