Alighiero Boetti

Independent Thoughts

1985

While the West has total supremacy over the art, Alighiero Boetti brings an oriental contribution to the contemporary art. Alighiero Boetti or Alighiero and Boetti, was born in Turin where he leaves his economic studies at the university, already passionate about art. Self-taught, since the early 1960s he creates abstract drawings and paintings, then he experiments works realized with plaster, masonite, plexiglas and luminous elements that lead him to his artistic debut in 1967 at the Christian Stein Gallery in Turin. Here he presents assembled works with industrial materials such as iron, wood, camouflage fabric, enamel paints. In those years, he joins the Arte Povera artistic movement, a movement consecrated internationally in 1969 with the figure of the critic Germano Celant and together with Giovanni Anselmo, Pier Paolo Calzolari, Luciano Fabro, Jannis Kounellis, Mario Merry, Giulio Paolini, Giuseppe Penone, Michelangelo Pistoletto, Emilio Print and Gilberto Zorio. Boetti analyzes the themes of: alteration, contrast, the double and one’s own identity. Among the group of artists of Arte Povera, he is the first to break away from it in 1972, when he is fascinated by oriental and African culture - he goes to Kabul (1971). There, he conceives the first tapestry with the embroidery of two dates on two canvases “16 Dicembre 2040” and “11 Luglio 2023” (the first indicates the centenary of his birth, the second the presumed date of his death). His most famous works are tapestries of different formats in which are inserted phrases and mottos invented by the artist, divided into grids. A second tapestry object is the planisphere, a project called Maps of Art, in 1990s: each nation is embroidered with the colours of its own flag. The idea of the maps was born in ’69 by coloring an atlas with all the flags. The small canvases with the letters embroidered by Afghan women express simple, immediate and colorful thoughts and concepts; but behind each work there is the story of Boetti who returns twice a year to Afghanistan (until the 1979 war, then in Peshawar, Pakistan) and who maintains contact with the embroiderers, worrying about their working conditions and that are not children. It is an ethic that is intertwined with art and a simplicity favourite to the artist. Each thread hides the effort and work of Afghan women, a part of them elevated to art and thus made immortal. A characteristic of his work was that of reserving the mental part to himself and delegating the executive phase to others. Alighiero Boetti has exhibited in the most emblematic exhibitions of his generation, from When attitudes become form (1969) to Contemporanea (1973); he has been several times at the Venice Biennale, with a personal room in the 1990 edition, a posthumous tribute in 2001 and with a large exhibition at the Cini Foundation in the recent 2017 edition. Lots of his artworks are in the Italian and international museums, including the Center Pompidou in Paris, the MOCA in Los Angeles.