Alighiero e Boetti


Through travels, collaborations, and a variety of mediums, Boetti playfully and systematically addressed the complementary themes of time and space, duality and multiplicity, and order and disorder. In 1967, his first exhibition in his native Turin featured works associated with the Arte Povera movement. The following year he left the radicalized artistic and political scene of northern Italy and moved to Rome. He thereafter started a body of conceptual works signed Alighiero “e” Boetti, introducing the theme of dualism and multiplication in his practice.

In 1971 Boetti first traveled to Kabul, Afghanistan, where he ran a hotel and started a long collaboration with craftswomen in a local embroidery school to make woven kilims of different dimensions and subject matter. His most extensive serial work, Mappa (Map, 1972) is based on an altered academic atlas, with sentences or numbers transcribed around its margins. Illustrative of Boetti’s concern with time and classification, Ammazzare il Tempo (To Kill Time, 1978) is composed of 100 embroidered squares with words organized into grids spelling out variations of the popular expression for coping with boredom. 

His interest in geography and systems led him to postal works. For Untitled. Victoria Boogie Woogie (1972) Boetti addressed letters to himself from various cities in Italy. Following a system based on the different colors of Italian postage, Boetti achieved some 5,040 different combinations that he installed in a grid, recalling Mondrian’s work referenced in the title. Similarly, in Opera Postale (Postal Work, 1980) the act of sending letters becomes a study of numerical progressions and multiplications. In Untitled (January–­December) (1986), Boetti tackles the problem of fixing present-time by faithfully reproducing magazine covers in black pencil drawings.

In 1994–95 the joint exhibition Alighiero e Boetti and Frédéric Bruly Bouabré: World Envisioned opened at Dia Center for the Arts, and in 2014 a display of Boetti’s works was on view at Dia:Beacon.


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Photo: Ethan Harrison

Worlds Envisioned: Alighiero e Boetti and Frédéric Bruly Bouabré


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