Valerio Adami is an Italian painter known for his highly stylised figurative paintings, characterised by flat areas of vivid colour enclosed by strong black outlines. His work combines elements of Pop Art and French cloisonnism with imagery drawn from modern life, literature, mythology, philosophy, and European history. Over a career spanning more than seven decades, Adami has developed a distinctive visual language in which figures, objects, architecture, and text are reduced to fragmented, graphic forms.

Born in Bologna in 1935, Adami began studying painting under Felice Carena at the age of ten. He entered the Accademia di Brera in Milan in 1951, where he studied drawing in the studio of Achille Funi until 1954. He travelled to Paris in 1955, where he encountered the work of Roberto Matta and Wifredo Lam. His early paintings were expressionistic, but during the 1960s he developed the flattened forms, vivid colours, and dark outlines that became characteristic of his mature style. His work drew on both European painting traditions and the emerging language of Pop Art.

Adami's first solo exhibition was held in Milan in 1959, and he subsequently exhibited widely across Europe and internationally. By the 1970s, his paintings increasingly incorporated political and intellectual subject matter, including modern European history, literature, philosophy, and mythology. In 1971, he and his brother Gioncarlo made the film Vacances dans le désert. He also collaborated with writers and intellectuals, illustrating a poem by Helmut Heissenbüttel in 1974 and becoming the subject of a major essay by the philosopher Jacques Derrida in 1975.

From the 1980s onward, Adami's work was the subject of a number of major retrospective exhibitions, including exhibitions in Paris, Valence, Tel Aviv, and Buenos Aires between 1985 and 1998. His practice continued to move between painting, drawing, illustration, and collaborations with writers and philosophers, reflecting his sustained interest in the relationship between images, language, and ideas.

Adami's work has been exhibited internationally and is held in major public and private collections. In 2010, the Boca Raton Museum of Art presented an exhibition devoted to his paintings and drawings. His work is also represented in the collections of institutions including the Museum of Modern Art in New York and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.