Kiss me Stupid

Galeri Nev’s adventure with the paper started back in 1984. The inaugural exhibition at the Nev Gallery, “The Hand” by Abidin Dino, was accompanied by a series of silkscreen prints. Different projects of lithography followed this first initiative, realized by the major painters from Turkey, and later collected by The British Museum, among several other devotees of works on paper around the world. In addition to the series of silkscreen and lithography edited by Nev, its loyalty to paper also gave a start, as early as 1985, to exhibitions of prints by the great artists of European Modernism. By showing Picasso, Dali, Bonnard, Dubuffet, Saura, Topor, Alechinsky, Pedersen, Levy and Velickovic prints, Nev presented a comprehensive profile from the post Second World War art scene. Thus, the viewers had the opportunity to see ‘local’ representatives of modernism and their contemporaries at the ‘centre’ consecutively; they thus had the chance to observe ‘other modernisms’ getting constructed.  On February 24th, 2012, Galeri Nev is adding VALERIO ADAMI to its list of iconic names from European Modernism; Adami’s work will be presented for the first time in Turkey. The exhibition including silkscreens, lithographies, etchings and édition de luxe books, aims at the same time to attract attention to Adami’s particular friendship and cooperation with the master of French philosophy: Jacques Derrida. Derrida’s 1975 text entitled “+R: Into the bargain”, constituting the core of his famous book on aesthetics, The Truth in Painting, will thus be published for the first time in Turkish by the gallery.
Valerio Adami was born in 1935 in Bologna, Italy. Between 1951-1954, he had been educated at the Accademia di Brera in Milan. The expressionist essays of his early years soon left their place to his very particular style constructed of thick and black lines, bright and intensive colours, and of shadowless and complicated figures. Adami had his first solo show in 1957 in Milan. In the 1964 Documenta in Kassel, he had a room devoted to his works. He had been invited to represent Italy in the São Paolo Biennial of 1967, and in the Venice Biennial of 1968. As early as 1970, art critics declared him as the major representative of the ‘New Figure’ painting. The very same year, his works inspired from literature, mythology and politics came together at his first retrospective at the Musée national d'art moderne de la Ville de Paris. This was followed by a Centre Pompidou retrospective in 1986, another one at the Centre Julio Gonzales in Venice in 1990, in Magazzini del Sale in Siena in 1994, in Palazzo Medici in Florence in 1996 and in Frissiras Museum in Athens in 2004. In addition to Derrida, Adami’s works dealing with social and individual memory attracted the attention of worldwide philosophers and writers such as Octavio Paz, Italo Calvino, Jean-François Lyotard and Carlos Fuentes.