Collection: Alighiero Boetti

Alighiero Fabrizio Boetti was born in Turin on December 16, 1940, into a cultured and cosmopolitan middle-class family. His father, Corrado, was a lawyer and manager with industrial interests, and his mother, a violinist with a passion for art. He grew up in a stimulating environment, where he developed a strong interest in philosophy, literature, geography, and Eastern cultures from an early age.

Although he enrolled in the Faculty of Economics and Business, Boetti soon abandoned his university studies to devote himself entirely to art. He was a cultured and curious self-taught artist, drawn both to avant-garde art and to philosophical and spiritual thought. His early reading included Nietzsche, Jung, Sufis and Eastern mystics, and texts on entropy, chance, and disorder.

In the 1960s he frequented the Turin scene animated by artists, critics and gallery owners such as Michelangelo Pistoletto, Mario Merz, Luciano Fabro, Giulio Paolini and Germano Celant, who in 1967 coined the term "Arte Povera" to define the new Italian artistic movement.

In 1967, Boetti held his first solo exhibition at the Galleria Christian Stein in Turin. The works from this period were made with industrial, humble, or unusual materials (cardboard, plexiglass, aluminum, electrical cables), and questioned the role of the artist as creator, introducing concepts such as process, time, and minimal gesture.

Despite being included in the first Arte Povera exhibition in Genoa in 1967, Boetti distinguished himself with an autonomous conceptual practice, increasingly distant from an ideological or "militant" vision. Beginning in 1971, he began signing his work "Alighiero e Boetti," a symbolic gesture reflecting his idea of ​​duality, division, and the coexistence of opposites. The artist was no longer a unified entity, but an individual torn between intention and chance, order and disorder.

1971 was a pivotal year: Boetti took his first trip to Afghanistan, where he was captivated by the local culture and craftsmanship. In Kabul, he opened the "One Hotel," a guesthouse run by local friends, which also became his studio. This was where one of his most celebrated series was born: the World Maps, embroidered by Afghan artisans based on his designs, in which each nation is represented by its own flag. The work combines geopolitical data, collaborative work, aesthetics, and symbolism.

Afghanistan and Pakistan become, for Boetti, central places in his poetics: lands of spirituality and relationships, embodying the opposite of Western rationalism. Embroidery—a traditionally feminine, slow, and collective activity—becomes for the artist a privileged medium for expressing the dilation of time, manual skill, and the relationship between the individual and the system.

In the 1970s and 1980s, Boetti developed a series of conceptual works based on the principle of rule + chance: letter grids, colored alphabets, secret phrases, compendiums of symbols and codes. Among the best known are the squares of embroidered letters ("Ordine e Disordine," "Dare tempo al tempo," "Mettere al mondo il mondo"), in which the artist established a formal rule, leaving the color to be decided by others, often arbitrarily.

Another important series is Tutto, embroidered carpets filled with images from encyclopedias, magazines, and books: a visual accumulation in which each figure has equal dignity, in an open and anarchic system, a reflection of the chaos of the contemporary world.

The artist increasingly operates as a creator and organizer of processes, leaving the manual execution to others. His method prefigures many contemporary artistic practices based on delegation, collaboration, and the international nature of artistic creation.

In the 1980s and 1990s, Boetti gained growing recognition in Italy and abroad. He participated in numerous editions of the Venice Biennale (1972, 1978, 1990), and in 1993 a solo room was dedicated to him in the Italian Pavilion. His works were exhibited in major international museums, including the Centre Pompidou in Paris, the MoMA in New York, and the Tate in London.

Despite his illness, he continued to work until the end with extraordinary clarity. He died in Rome in 1994, at the age of 53.

Alighiero Boetti's work has attracted growing interest from the art world since his death. His practice anticipates central contemporary themes: globalization, artistic collaboration, interculturality, and the decentralization of the artist.

In 2011-2012, the retrospective “Game Plan”, curated by Lynne Cooke and Christian Rattemeyer, celebrated his figure with stops at the Reina Sofía in Madrid, the Tate Modern in London and the MoMA in New York.

Today his works are present in the permanent collections of the most important museums around the world and continue to inspire artists, critics and curators for their openness, conceptual complexity and formal beauty.