Alighiero Boetti

Alighiero Boetti (a/k/a Alighiero e Boetti), (1940, Turin – 1994, Rome) is an Italian conceptual artist, considered to be a member of the art movement Arte Povera.

Biography

Alighiero Fabrizio Boetti was born in 1940, in Turin, a city in the industrial center of northern Italy, 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 his 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 Annemarie Sauzeau, whom he was to marry in 1964 and with whom he had two children, Matteo (1967) and Agata (1972).

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.

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.

Career

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 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 the most modest of 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 "Yearly Lamp" (1966), a light bulb in a 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.

Boetti disassociated himself from the Arte Povera movement in the early 1970s, without, however, completely abandoning some of its democratic, anti-elitist, strategies. 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.

Boetti often collaborated with other people, 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 ("arrazzi") 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: "Order is Disorder") or "Fuso Ma Non Confuso" ("I fuse but I don't confuse"), 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 colors and thus deciding the final look of the work.

Similarly, in the "lavori biro" ball pen paintings, he would invite friends and acquaintances, to fill large colored sections of the work by ball pen, typically alternating between a man and a woman.

Perhaps best known is his series of large embroidered maps of the world, also created in collaboration with Afghan and Pakistani crafts-workers. The maps delineate the political boundaries of the countries, with each of them being embroidered with the design of its national flag. A chief example of this series, "Mappa del Mondo, 1989" ("Map of the World, 1989"), is on view in the permanent collection of the Museum of Modern Art in New York (see "Key Works").

elect Exhibitions

* Galleria Christian Stein, Turin, Italy, 1967

* "Arte Povera", Galleria La Bertesca, Genoa, 1967 (group exhibition)

* "Shaman Showman", Galleria De Nieubourg, Milan, Italy, 1969

* "When Attitude Becomes Form", curated by Harald Szeemann, Kunsthalle Bern, Switzerland, 1969 (group exhibition)

* "Io che prendo il sole a Torino il 24-2-1969", Galleria Sperone, Turin, Italy, 1969.

* John Weber Gallery, New York, 1973

* "Mettere al mondo il mondo", Sperone-Fischer Gallery, Rome, Italy, 1973

* Kunstmuseum Lucerne, Switzerland, 1975.

* Kunsthalle Basel, curated by Jean-Christophe Amman, Basel, Switzerland, 1978

* 44th Venice Biennale, Venice, Italy, 1990.

* "Synchronizitaet als ein Prinzip akausaler Zusammenhaenge", Kunstverein, Bonn, Germany; Westfalischer Kunstverein, Munster, Germany; Kunstmuseum, Lucerne, Switzerland, 1992-1993

* "Alternando da 1 a 100 e viceversa", Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble, Grenoble, France, 1993

* The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, California, 1994

* P.S.1 Museum, Long Island City, New York, 1994.

* "Alighiero e Boetti", part of the project, "Origin and Destination", Societe des Expositions du Palais des Beaux-Arts de Bruxelles, Brussels, Belgium, 1994

* "Alighiero Boetti", Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin, Italy; Musee d'Art Moderne, Villeneuve d'Ascq, France; Museum Moderner Kunst, Stiftung Ludwig, Vienna, Austria, 1996-97
* "Alighiero Boetti: Mettere al mondo il mondo" ("Bringing the World into the World") - Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt am Main, Germany, and Galerie Jahrhunderthalle Hoechst, Germany, 1998

* "Boetti; the maverick spirit of Arte Povera" Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1999

* "Zero to Infinity, Arte Povera 1962-1972" - Tate Modern, London, [http://www.tate.org.uk/modern/exhibitions/artepovera/boetti.htm] ' Walker Center for the Arts, Minneapolis, MI, 2001-2002 [http://www.walkerart.org/archive/5/AD73F90F341B63316165.htm]

* "When 1 is 2: The Art of Alighiero e Boetti" - Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston, TX, 2002

* "Quasi Tutto", Galleria d'Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Bergamo, Italy, 2004.

Key Works (Selection)

* "Mappa del Mondo, 1989" ("Map of the World, 1989"), Afghan embroidery on fabric, Collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York [http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?object_id=80620] (image)

* "Tutto" ("Everything"), 1993, Afghan embroidery on fabric, collection of the Museum of Modern Art in Frankfurt am Main, Germany [http://www.mmk-frankfurt.de] (no image available).

elect Literature

* La Tartaruga Gallery (ed.), "Il teatro delle mostre" (Rome, Lerici editore, 1968, in Italian)

* Alberto Boatto, "Alighiero & Boetti" (Ravenna, Essegi Ed., 1984, in Italian)

* Rolf Lauter, "Alighiero e Boetti: Mettere il mondo al mondo" (Hatje Cantz Verlag, 1988, in German, catalogue for the exhibition "Mettere al mondo il mondo")

* Germano Celant, Umberto Allemandi, et al., "Arte povera" (Turin, 1989, in Italian)

* Collaboration "Parkett" No. 24 (art magazine, Parkett Verlag Zurich, Switzerland, 1990, in German and English)

* Annelie Pohlen, "Alighiero e Boetti - 1965 bis 1991" (Bonner Kunstverein, 1992, in German)

* Jean-Christophe Ammann, M. T. Roberto, A. Sauzeau (eds.), "Alighiero e Boetti - 1965-1994" (Milan, Edizioni Mazzotta, 1996, in Italian).

* Germano Celant, "Alighiero Boetti", (Milan, Skira, 2001, published in connection with the exhibition "Alighiero Boetti. Niente da vedere niente da nascondere" at the 49th Venice Biennale, 2001)

* Paola Morsiani and Barry Schwabsky (eds.), "When 1 is 2: The Art of Alighiero e Boetti" (Houston, Contemporary Arts Museum, 2002)
* Hans Ulrich Obrist, "Interviews Volume I" (Milan, Fondazione Pitti Immagine Discovery/Charta, 2003)

* Maura Picciau, Giorgio Maffei (eds.), "Alighiero Boetti “Tutto libro”" (Edizoni SACS, 2004, in Italian)

* Giacinto Di Pietrantonio, Corrado Levi (eds.), "Alighiero Boetti – Quasi tutto" (Milan, Silvana Editoriale, 2004, in Italian)

* Annemarie Sauzeau, Luca Sassella (eds.), "Shaman showman Alighiero e Boetti" (Rome, 2006, in Italian)

External links

* Website of the Alighiero Boetti Foundation (Fondazione Alighiero Boetti), in Italian: [http://www.fondazioneboetti.it/]

* Website of the Alighiero Boetti Archives (Archivio Alighiero Boetti), in English and Italian: [http://www.archivioalighieroboetti.it/index_eng.asp]

* Unofficial website devoted to Alighiero e Boetti and his work, in Italian: [http://www.boettiealighiero.virtuale.org/]

* More examples of Alighiero e Boetti's work, including "lavori biro" and embroideries, from the website of the Sperone Westwater Gallery in New York: [http://www.speronewestwater.com/cgi-bin/iowa/artists/related.html?record=17&info=works]