Alighiero Boetti - vendere e comprare opere
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 and of Italian conceptual art. Alongside Lucio Fontana and Alberto Burri, he is considered one of Italy's most creative and productive art world denizens of the 20th century.
Alighiero Boetti was born in Turin in 1940 and travelled to Paris at the age of twenty, where he trained as an engraver and met his future wife. He had a wide ranging interests (spanning philosophy, linguistics, literature, maths) and a pronounced love for the work of Hermann Hesse as well as that of artists such as Lucio Fontana and Nicolas de Stael. The 1960s saw him celebrate his first artistic successes in connection with the Arte Povera movement. Towards the end of the 1960s, Boetti increasingly turned to conceptual art, creating in 1968, his work "Twins", a photomontage in which he himself was depicted twice and which he signed "Alighiero e Boetti". This doubling of his signature, which he introduced in the early 1970s, alludes to multiple principles underpinning his work: the dichotomy of concept and execution, the importance of chance and play and his distancing from classical authorship.
In the 1970s, Boetti repeatedly travelled to Afghanistan. He felt a strong attraction to Central Asian culture and the mysterious world of the Middle East, which led him to establish an especially intimate and lasting connection with the country, where he also commissioned weavers to produce his textile artworks. The 1970s was also when he started to make his iconic Biro series - drawings in which the artist would fill entire sheets with biros ink in different colours.
Boetti felt the pull of many artistic trends, but 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, the Tate Modern in London and the Museum of Modern Art.