Alighiero Boetti - Buy or sell works
16 December 1940, Turin (Italy) – 24 April 1994, Rome (Italy)
The graphic artist, painter and object artist Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994) was an important representative of the Arte Povera movement as well as of Italian conceptual art. He is considered one of the most creative and productive Italian artists of the 20th century alongside Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri.
Alighiero Boetti was born in Turin in 1940 and travelled to Paris at the age of twenty, where he pursued an engraver training and met his future wife. He had a wide range of interests, from philosophy and linguistics to mathematics and literature, with a particular penchant for Hermann Hesse and artists like Lucio Fontana and Nicolas de Stael. He celebrated his first artistic successes in the 1960s when he joined the Arte Povera movement. Towards the end of the 1960s, Boetti increasingly turned to conceptual art. In 1968, he created the work “Twins”, a photomontage in which he himself was depicted twice and which he signed “Alighiero e Boetti”. The doubling of his signature, which he introduced at the beginning of the 1970s, alludes to numerous principles of his work; the dichotomy of concept and execution, the importance of chance and game, as well the demarcation from classical authorship.
During the 1970s, Boetti repeatedly travelled to Afghanistan. The strong attraction that Central-Asian culture and the mysterious Middle Eastern world exerted on him led him to establish a particularly intimate and lasting connection with this country, where he also commissioned weavers to produce his textile artworks. In the 1970s, he also began his iconic Biro-series, a series of pen drawings for which the artist dyed whole sheets of paper with different coloured pen inks.
Boetti felt connected to many trends, even though he always rejected a romantically exaggerated artistic self-image. A major retrospective of the artist’s work was shown at the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid, in the Tate Modern in London and in the Museum of Modern Art in New York.