Background
Alighiero Boetti was born on December 16, 1940 in Turin, Italy, to Corrado Boetti, a lawyer, and Adelina Marchisio, a violinist.
Alighiero Boetti was born on December 16, 1940 in Turin, Italy, to Corrado Boetti, a lawyer, and Adelina Marchisio, a violinist.
Already in his early years, Boetti had profound and wide-ranging theoretical interests and studied works on such diverse topics as philosophy, alchemy and esoterics. Besides, he abandoned his studies at the business school of the University of Turin to work as an artist.
At age twenty, Boetti moved to Paris. In 1962, while in France, he met art critic and writer Annemarie Sauzeau.
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.
Boetti continued to work with a wide array of materials, tools, and techniques, including ball pens (biro) and even the postal system. An example of his Arte Povera work is "Lampada annuale" ("Yearly Lamp") (1966).
In 1967, Boetti produced the piece "Manifesto", a poster listing the names of artists that make up Boetti’s creative background. In January 1968, Boetti returned to the two-dimensionality of paper with publishing a poster in an edition of 800, containing a list of 16 Italian artists of his own generation.
In 1971 he made a diptych with two dates: the first, 16 December 2040, is the 100th anniversary of his birth; the second, 11 July 2023 the date he predicted would be his own death.
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.
From 1974 to 1976, he travelled to Guatemala, Ethiopia, Sudan. He also 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.
His most ambitious project was a large embroidered piece titled "Classificazione dei mille fiumi piu lunghi del mondo" (Classification of the thousand longest rivers in the world (1977).
In 1983 Boetti created the series of pencil drawings traced from the covers of popular magazines. The same year he created the large wall mosaic in white ceramic for the external façade of the Art Gallery of the California State University, Northridge, for which he used cardboards with drawings made by the students following his indications.
He took part at the Lucio Amelio's exibithion "Terrae Motus" in 1986.
Moreover, he often designed textiles to be embroidered in artisan workshops, and from 1987 until his death, Boetti was completely absorbed in the creation of his largest and most complex tapestry "Tutto" which was created to represent the cultural diversity of the world.
Alighiero Boetti died on February 24, 1994 in Rome, Italy.
Zig Zag
Rane e specchi
Oggi venticinquesimo giorno del settimo mese...
Untitled
Per nuovi desideri
D'un jour a l'autre
Immaginando Tutto
Emme I Elle
Ma cosa fai? Ma cosa dici?
Dama
Pesci spada
Vorrei elogiare il vento e i venti che colorano
Untitled (Panthers)
Tavola pitagorica (Farsi)
Mettere i verbi all'infinito millenovecento ottantotto...
AEB
Mimetico
Oggi Venisetesimo Giorno Undicesimo...
Alternando da 1 a 100 e viceversa
Aerei
Da Alighiero Nati a Guido Boetti
Svelare e rivelare
Fanno Cinque
Untitled
Mappa
Rassegna Internazionale Teatri Stabili; Faccine Colorate
Untitled (TRE123AEB)
Untitled (Tuffatore)
Lampada annuale
Autodisporsi
L'energia Iniziale
Probing The Mysteries Of A Double Life
Tutto
Bugs Bunny
Untitled (Stambecchi)
Auto-nomo (I Vedenti)
A braccia conserte
Pier-Piet
Mappa del mondo
Mappa
Afghanistan
Cinque Per Cinque Venticinque
Uno dei tre quadri muti senza scrittura
Giocando
Dieciundicidodici
1983
Svelare e Rivelare
Untitled
Cubo
Millenovecentottantacinque
Untitled
Untitled
Boetti was preoccupied with the tension between order and disorder or chance, as seen in his recurring grid structures. Viewing himself as a dual being, he introduced the "e" (meaning "and") into his name to signify a twinned nature.
Quotations:
“I went to a supplier of building materials. It was thrilling to see the wonderful things that were there! Some of the best moments in Arte Povera were hardware shop moments.”
"The conditions for a life of passion were there, but I had to destroy them in order to salvage them."
Alighiero Boetti was a member of the art movement Arte Povera.
He married Annemarie Sauzeau in 1964. The couple had two children, Matteo (born in 1967) and Agata (born in 1972).