Alighiero Boetti

Alighiero Boetti was one of the most influential figures in art of the postwar era in Italy. Boetti was a founding member of the Arte Povera movement, creating works composed of modest and everyday materials such as ball pens, lamps, and other found objects. The movement sought to reposition art away from its associations of elitism and riches, and Boetti's works of this time also demonstrate his interest in the relationship between chance and order, in systems of classifying data, and in non-Western cultural practices. 

In 1972 he disassociated himself from the Arte Povera group and moved to Rome, where he forged a highly original conceptual idiom. Around this time he changed his name to 'Alighiero e Boetti' and started signing his work this way, as though he were two artists in one. He also often invited others - both artists and non-artists - to collaborate on his works, giving them significant freedom in the creative process. An example of this is his lavori biro (ball-point paintings), for which he invited acquaintances to fill large coloured sections of a multi-part work using only a biro.

Between 1971 to 1994 he undertook a series of projects working together with Afghan embroiderers. The resulting embroideries, many of which are monumental in scale, remain his most iconic works. Boetti first worked in Kabul, and then, following the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan in 1979, in the refugee camps of Pakistan. His female Afghan collaborators transformed Boetti’s templates into embroidered pieces, including Arazzi, brightly coloured grids of letters that spell out phrases, Mappe, world maps with each country delineated by the colours and symbols of their flags; and Tutti, filled with diverse objects, from sunglasses to scissors, collaged intricately together.

Boetti participated in several important exhibitions throughout his lifetime, including a retrospective in 1992 at Bonn and Münster in Germany, and at Lucerne, Switzerland. After his death in 1994, several retrospectives were organised to honour the artist and the significant contribution he made to 20th-century art.