Alighiero Boetti (1940)
Italy


Biography :

Alighiero Boetti is considered one of the main artists of the Italian avant-garde born in the mid-1960s. They, notably members of Arte Povera [1], claimed a socially engaged and openly critical attitude towards society. of consumption. Boetti's works have thus participated in a renewal of artistic language, favoring the creative process over the finished object and the conceptual meaning of the work of art over its narrative or aesthetic dimension. His work is still very present today within international institutions and was the subject between 2011 and 2012 of a major traveling retrospective presented at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Tate Modern in London and the MOMA in New York .


Alighiero Boetti creates “objects” composed of common materials such as wood, cardboard or aluminum and is interested in chance, measurement, duality and multiplicity. He addressed these notions in particular in 1968 through Gemelli [Twins], a photomontage which shows him holding hands with his double, and the poster Shaman Showman [Shaman showman] where his effigy is doubled and inverted. It was also at this time that he decided to separate his first and last name with the coordinating conjunction e (and in Italian). The question of the double and duality in general then leads to a questioning of the very principles of identity and individuality of the artist, which are usually expressed through a style effect and an identifiable signature.

In 1969, Alighiero e Boetti practiced Mail Art with Viaggi Postali [Postal Journey], postal works which multiplied the possible compositions of stamped and franked envelopes. Sent to loved ones or to imaginary addresses, they explore the themes of temporal and spatial movement, through the crossed effects of combinatorics and randomness.

Considering that the manufacturing of his works could be delegated within the framework of collaborations, the artist implemented a mode of artistic “subcontracting” during a trip to Afghanistan in 1971 during which he discovered the traditions of the weavers of this country. He entrusted Afghan women with the making of picture rugs, such as the Mappa [Maps] series. This approach reflects the political commitment of the artist and his conception of the work, based on the erasure of his subjectivity in favor of external collaboration. “For me, the work of the embroidered Mappa is the ideal of beauty. For this work, I did nothing, chose nothing, in the sense that: The world is made as it is, not as I designed it (…); when the basic idea, the concept, emerges, everything else does not require a choice.

[1] Term used for the first time in September 1967 by Germano Celant to title an exhibition presented in Genoa. The notion of “poverty” should be understood more as a voluntary detachment from cultural achievements than as the exclusive choice of natural or waste materials.

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