Alighiero Boetti

Alighiero e Boetti 1940 Turin - 1994 Rome The Italian artist Alighiero e Boetti (actually simply Alighiero Boetti) was born in Turin on December 16, 1940. He began to study economics at the University of Turin, but dropped out after a short time. As a self-taught artist, he turned to art, passionately traveling the world, interested in mathematics, music, philosophy and esotericism. In 1967, the Galleria Christian Stein held Alighiero Boetti's first solo exhibition. Alighiero e Boetti became known to a wider public through the exhibition "Arte povera - Im spazio" at the Galleria La Bertesca in Genoa, also in 1967, which featured works using a wide variety of materials and methods of production. With great joy in experimentation, Alighiero e Boetti uses iron, wood, eternit, camouflage fabrics and lacquer paints as well as everyday objects, such as a light bulb, for his assemblages and conceptual works. As "Lampada annuale" (Annual Lamp, 1966), such a light bulb mounted in a box made of wood and metal lights up only once a year at an unpredictable time for eleven seconds. Alighiero e Boetti himself describes this as "an expression not of the event, but of the idea of that event." Colorful letter paintings and embroidered maps Alighiero e Boetti becomes one of the most important artists of Arte Povera and until 1972, the end of the movement, participates internationally in all the important exhibitions dedicated to it. In 1971 Alighiero e Boetti travels to Afghanistan for the first time. He is seized by a deep passion for this country and until 1979, until the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan, he travels there at least twice a year for increasingly longer stays. In Afghanistan he has women embroider letter pictures and world maps in bright colors. The series of "Mappa" and "Arazzi" were created, which today are most closely associated with his name and are his best-known series of works. Here, too, he follows a concept in that, although he provides the letters and words, he leaves the choice of color and colorful implementation entirely to the embroidering women. This conceptual approach becomes even clearer in the series of embroidered maps, "Mappa," where the artist uses only what is already there. He says of it in 1994: "The world is as it is, I didn't draw it; the flags are as they are, I didn't draw those either, so I did absolutely nothing to them." In the "Arazzi" series of works, the squaring of individual words and short texts takes on special significance. Read from top to bottom, they produce sayings such as "dare tempo al tempo" (give time to time) or "ordine e disordine" (order and disorder). A third important series of works are the dense and impressive ballpoint pen drawings of the "Lavori Biro". Harmony of dualism: contrapuntal artist persona In 1972 he begins to combine his first and last name with an "e" (and), so that the one artist persona seemingly becomes two: Alighiero and Boetti. The apparent doubling is meant as a visualization of the opposing factors in the world as in his works: individual and society, error and perfection, feeling and acting, order and disorder, nothing and everything. In 1972 and 1982 Alighiero e Boetti participates in Documenta 5 and 7 in Kassel and in 1995 in the Venice Biennale. To this day, numerous exhibitions have been dedicated to his work and his art continues to enjoy the highest esteem. Among the selection of the most important museum shows, in addition to the numerous exhibitions in his native Italy, are the exhibition at the Kunsthalle Basel in 1978, the exhibition "Alighiero Boetti: Mettere al mondo il mondo" at the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main in 1998, and the magnificent posthumous retrospective "Alighiero e Boetti: Game Plan" at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía in Madrid, which also made stops at the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art in New York, illuminating the playful moment inherent in Alighiero e Boetti's art. Alighiero e Boetti died in Rome on April 24, 1994, as a result of a brain tumor.