Alighiero Fabrizio Boetti, known as Alighiero e Boetti (16 December 1940 – 24 April 1994) was an Italian painter, sculptor and conceptual artist, considered to be a member of the art movement Arte Povera.
Background Boetti is most famous for a series of embroidered maps of the world, Mappa, created between 1971 and his premature death in 1994. Boetti's work was typified by his notion of 'twinning', leading him to add 'e' (and) between his names, 'stimulating a dialectic exchange between these two selves'.Oxford Art Online, Alighiero Boetti, essay by Mathew Gale
Life Alighiero Boetti was born in Turin, to Corrado Boetti, a lawyer, and Adelina Marchisio, a violinist. Boetti abandoned his studies at the business school of the University of Turin to work as an artist. Already in his early years, he had profound and wide-ranging theoretical interests and studied works on such diverse topics as philosophy, alchemy and esoterics. Among the preferred authors of his youth were the German writer Hermann Hesse and the Swiss-German painter and Bauhaus teacher Paul Klee. Boetti also had a continuing interest in mathematics and music.
At seventeen, Boetti discovered the works of the German painter Wols and the cut canvases of Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana. Boetti's own works of his late teen years, however, are oil paintings somewhat reminiscent of the Russian painter Nicolas de Staël. At age twenty, Boetti moved to Paris to study engraving. In 1962, while in France, he met art critic and writer Annemarie Sauzeau, whom he was to marry in 1964 and with whom he had two children, Matteo (1967) and Agata (1972).Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan, July 1 – October 1, 2012 Museum of Modern Art, New York. From 1974 to 1976, he travelled to Guatemala, Ethiopia, and Sudan. Boetti was passionate about non-Western cultures, particularly of central and southern Asia, and travelled to Afghanistan and Pakistan numerous times in the 1970s and 1980s, although Afghanistan became inaccessible to him following the Soviet invasion in 1979. In 1975, he went back to New York.
Active as an artist from the early 1960s to his premature death in 1994, Boetti developed a significant body of diverse works that were often both poetic and pleasing to the eye while at the same time steeped in his diverse theoretical interests and influenced by his extensive travels.
He died of a brain tumour in Rome in 1994 at the age of 53.Charles Darwent (4 March 2012), Alighiero Boetti, Tate Modern, London The Independent.
Career Arte Povera From 1963 to 1965, Boetti began to create works out of then unusual materials such as plaster, masonite, plexiglass, light fixtures and other industrial materials. His first solo show was in 1967, at the Turin gallery of Christian Stein. Later that year, he participated in an exhibition at Galleria La Bertesca in the Italian city of Genoa, with a group of other Italian artists that referred to their works as Arte Povera, or poor art, a term subsequently widely propagated by Italian art critic Germano Celant.
Boetti continued to work with a wide array of materials, tools, and techniques, including ball pens (biro) and even the postal system. Some of Boetti's artistic strategies are considered typical for Arte Povera, namely the use of the most modest materials and techniques, to take art off its pedestal of attributed "dignity". Boetti also took a keen interest in the relationship between chance and order, in various systems of classification (grids, maps, etc.), and non-Western traditions and cultural practices, influenced by his Afghanistan and Pakistan travels.
An example of his Arte Povera work is Lampada annuale (Yearly Lamp) (1966), a single, outsized light bulb in a mirror-lined wooden box, which randomly switches itself on for eleven seconds each year. This work focuses both on the transformative powers of energy, and on the possibilities and limitations of chance – the likelihood of a viewer being present at the moment of illumination is remote. In 1967, Boetti produced the piece Manifesto, a poster listing the names of artists who make up Boetti's creative background.Alighiero Boetti Museum Ritter, Waldenbuch.
Dossier Postale (1969–70) consists of a series of letters which were sent to 26 well-known recipients, primarily artists (Giulio Paolini, Bruce Nauman), art critics (Lucy Lippard, Arturo Schwarz), dealers (Konrad Fischer, Leo Castelli), and collectors (Giuseppe Panza, Corrado Levi) active at the time. Boetti sent the envelopes to imaginary addresses, thus each letter was returned to the artist undelivered, demonstrating Boetti's preoccupation with improbability and chance.Alighiero Boetti, 28 February – 31 March 2012, Sprüth Magers, London.Alighiero e Boetti, 25 January – 6 April 2002 The Arts Club of Chicago.
1972–1994 Boetti disassociated himself from the Arte Povera movement in 1972 and moved to Rome, without, however, completely abandoning some of its democratic, anti-elitist strategies. In 1973, he renamed himself as a dual persona Alighiero e Boetti ("Alighiero and Boetti"), reflecting the opposing factors presented in his work: the individual and society, error and perfection, order and disorder. Already in his double-portrait I Gemelli begun in 1968 and published as a postcard, Boetti had altered photographs so that he appeared to be holding the hand of his identical twin.Alighiero e Boetti, October 20 – November 24, 2007 Gladstone Gallery, New York.Holland Cotter (28 June 2012), The Whole World, Stitched and Patched – Alighiero Boetti Retrospective at Museum of Modern Art The New York Times.Alighiero e Boetti, February 10 – March 31, 2001 Gagosian Gallery, New York.
He often collaborated with both artists and non-artists, giving them significant freedom in their contributions to his works. For instance, one of the better known types of his works consists of colored letters embroidered in grids ("arazzi", meaning wall hangings or tapestries) on canvases of varying sizes, the letters upon closer inspection reading as short phrases in Italian, for instance Ordine e Disordine ("Order and Disorder") or Fuso Ma Non Confuso ("Mixed but not mixed up"), or similar truisms and wordplays. To create these pictures, Boetti worked with artisan embroiderers in Afghanistan and Pakistan, to whom he gave his designs but increasingly handed over the process of selecting and combining the colours and thus deciding the final aesthetic look of the work.
Similarly, in the lavori biro (ball pen paintings), he would invite friends and acquaintances to fill large coloured sections of the multi-part work by ball pen, typically alternating between a man and a woman from one sheet to another. Boetti made his first ballpoint ink drawings in 1972–73 and continued through the late 1980s.Alighiero e Boetti: "Simmetria Asimmetria", 10 January – 2 March 2002 Sperone Westwater Gallery, New York.Lines of Engagement, 1 June – 1 July 2003 Sperone Westwater Gallery, New York. The largest of all Boetti's Biro works are the four versions of Ononimo (1973), with their progressions of eleven separate panels, each hand-coloured in biro (two in blue biro and two in red).Alighiero Boetti, Ononimo (1973) Christie's Post War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction, 11 February 2010, London.
His most ambitious project is a large embroidered piece titled Classificazione dei mille fiumi piu lunghi del mondo (Classification of the thousand longest rivers in the world) (1977).Roberta Smith (26 April 1994), Alighiero e Boetti, 53, an Artist Who Mixed Disparate Elements The New York TimesAlighiero Boetti, I mille fiumi più lunghi del mondo (The Thousand Longest Rivers in the World) (ca. 1975) Christie's Post War and Contemporary Art Evening Auction, 11 February 2010, London.
Following an invitation by Hans Ulrich Obrist, the artist published six of his watercolour drawings in Austrian Airlines' in-flight magazine 'Sky Lines'. To accompany this publication, jigsaws of the images were produced and were available to passengers on the flights at this time.
In 1986, he took part in the Lucio Amelio's exhibition "Terrae Motus". After the 1980 Irpinia earthquake, the Neapolitan gallerist asked the major contemporary artists of that time to realise a work of art about the earthquake; so Boetti realised for this occasion Di palo in frasca nell'estate dell'anno millenovecentottantasei, accanto al Pantheon, a reflection on the concepts of time and thinking: the monkey stands for the human thought's capacity to jump from one thought to another.
Embroideries
Perhaps best known is Boetti's series of large embroidered maps of the world, called simply Mappa. After the Six-Day War in June 1967, the artist began to collect newspaper covers featuring maps of war zones.Alighiero Boetti, Dodici forme dal 10 giugno 1967 (1967–1971) Christie's: The Italian Sale, 14 October 2011, London. He then asked his wife to embroider the shapes from the June 1967 map.Holland Cotter (28 June 2012), "The Whole World, Stitched and Patched – Alighiero Boetti Retrospective at Museum of Modern Art". The New York Times. nytimes.com. He pondered the idea of the first large-scale Mappa during his second voyage to Afghanistan in 1971,Alighiero e Boetti, November 7, 2009 – January 23, 2010 Gladstone Gallery, New York. resulting in a series of woven world maps entitled Territori Occupati.Alighiero e Boetti Frieze Magazine, Issue 50, January–February 2000. Between 1971 and 1979 he set up the One Hotel with his friend and business partner Gholam DastaghirAnnemarie Sauzeau (2011): Alighiero Boetti's One Hotel Hatje Cantz Publishing. in KabulAlighiero Boetti, 21 February – 27 May 2012 Tate Modern, London. as a kind of artistic communeMike Collett-White (27 February 2012), Alighiero Boetti was an Italian artist who put Afghanistan on the map – literally Reuters. and created large colourful embroideries, the most famous of these were the Mappa, world maps in which each country features the design of its national flag. In 1971, Boetti commissioned women at an embroidery school in Kabul to embroider his first map. He initially intended to make only one but went on to commission roughly 150 of them in his lifetime, with no two possessing exactly the same dimensions.
Boetti's maps reflect a changing geopolitical world from 1971 to 1994, a period that included the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall. Embroidered by up to 500 artisans in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the maps were the result of a collaborative process, leaving the design to the geopolitical realities of the time, and the choice of colours to the artisans responsible for the embroidery. The maps delineate the political boundaries of the countries.Out of Time: A Contemporary View, August 30, 2006 – April 9, 2007 MoMA, New York. In one map, the sea is unexpectedly coloured pink rather than blue, as landlocked Afghans had no tradition of mapping, certainly not of oceans. The border texts contain dates or details relative to the work's production, Boetti's signature and sayings, as well as excerpts from Sufi poetry. "For me the work of the embroidered Mappa is the maximum of beauty. For that work I did nothing, chose nothing, in the sense that: the world is made as it is, not as I designed it, the flags are those that exist, and I did not design them; in short I did absolutely nothing; when the basic idea, the concept, emerges everything else requires no choosing." Alighiero e Boetti, 1974Quoted in Mappa, Luca Cerizza, Afterall Books, 2008