Alighiero Boetti

Turin, Italy, 1940–1994

Conceptual artist and leading member of the Arte Povera movement. He abandoned his business school studies to pursue a career in art, but he engaged with philosophy, music, mathematics, literature and alchemy throughout his life. As a young artist in the 1960s, he joined Mario and Marisa Merz, Giulio Paolini, Michelangelo Pistoletto, and Luciano Fabro in forming Arte Povera, a movement that promoted breaking with conventional power structures, corporate mentality and traditional artistic practices.

Like many artists of the Arte Povera group, Boetti turned to a variety of textiles and modes of production that lie outside of the formal fine arts. Using ball point pens, flags, postal stamps, and textiles of different textures, Boetti created a series of Mappa, or maps of the world, which chart political, anthropological or cultural identities of regions or countries. Some of his works were temporal, wherein lights would randomly turn on for only seconds of a year, perhaps even in empty rooms. He used the postal system, grid structures or arbitrary time frames as a means to explore his deep interest in the role of chance in his artistic production.

Represented by Larkin Erdmann Fine Art, Zurich.