Alighiero Boetti

Alighiero Fabrizio Boetti known as Alighiero e Boetti (16 December 1940 – 24 February 1994) was an Italian conceptual artist, considered to be a member of the art movement Arte Povera.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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 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.

In 1967, Boetti produced the piece Manifesto, a poster listing the names of artists that make up Boetti's creative background.

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.

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 colors 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 colored sections of the multi-part work by ball pen, typically alternating between a man and a woman from one sheet to another.

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.

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.

Boetti is most famous for a series of embroidered maps of the world, Mappa, created between 1971 and his 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'.

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.

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.

Boetti made his first ballpoint ink drawings in 1972–73 and continued through the late 1980s.

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.

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).

From 1974 to 1976, he travelled to Guatemala, Ethiopia, Sudan.

In 1975, he went back to New York.

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).

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.

He died of a brain tumour in Rome in 1994 at the age of 53.