25 Facts About Alighiero Boetti

Alighiero Fabrizio Boetti, known as Alighiero e Boetti was an Italian conceptual artist, considered to be a member of the art movement Arte Povera.

Alighiero Boetti abandoned his studies at the business school of the University of Turin to work as an artist.

At seventeen, Alighiero Boetti discovered the works of the German painter Wols and the cut canvases of Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana.

At age twenty, Alighiero Boetti moved to Paris to study engraving.

Alighiero Boetti was passionate about non-western cultures, particularly of central and southern Asia, and travelled to Afghanistan and Pakistan numerous times in the 1970s and 1980s, although Afghanistan became inaccessible to him following the Soviet invasion in 1979.

Active as an artist from the early 1960s to his premature death in 1994, Alighiero Boetti developed a significant body of diverse works that were often both poetic and pleasing to the eye while at the same time steeped in his diverse theoretical interests and influenced by his extensive travels.

Alighiero Boetti died of a brain tumour in Rome in 1994 at the age of 53.

From 1963 to 1965, Alighiero Boetti began to create works out of then unusual materials such as plaster, masonite, plexiglass, light fixtures and other industrial materials.

Alighiero Boetti continued to work with a wide array of materials, tools, and techniques, including ball pens and even the postal system.

In 1967, Alighiero Boetti produced the piece Manifesto, a poster listing the names of artists that make up Alighiero Boetti's creative background.

Alighiero Boetti sent the envelopes to imaginary addresses, thus each letter was returned to the artist undelivered, demonstrating Alighiero Boetti's preoccupation with improbability and chance.

Alighiero Boetti disassociated himself from the Arte Povera movement in 1972 and moved to Rome, without completely abandoning some of its democratic, anti-elitist, strategies.

Already in his double-portrait I Gemelli begun in 1968 and published as a postcard, Alighiero Boetti had altered photographs so that he appeared to be holding the hand of his identical twin.

Alighiero Boetti often collaborated with both artists and non-artists, giving them significant freedom in their contributions to his works.

Alighiero Boetti then asked his wife to embroider the shapes from the June 1967 map.

Alighiero Boetti pondered the idea of the first large-scale Mappa during his second voyage to Afghanistan in 1971, resulting in a series of woven world maps entitled Territori Occupati.

In 1971, Alighiero Boetti commissioned women at an embroidery school in Kabul to embroider his first map.

Alighiero Boetti initially intended to make only one but went on to commission roughly 150 of them in his lifetime, with no two possessing exactly the same dimensions.

Alighiero Boetti's maps reflect a changing geopolitical world from 1971 to 1994, a period that included the collapse of the Soviet Union and the fall of the Berlin Wall.

The invasion of Afghanistan by Russian troops in 1979 shifted production completely from Kabul to Peshawar in Pakistan, where the group of Afghan women had taken refuge and where Alighiero Boetti was only able to reconnect with them through middlemen.

Alighiero Boetti therefore asked photographer Randi Malkin Steinberger, with whom he had collaborated on the book Accanto al Pantheon in Rome, to go to Peshawar in 1990 to photograph the craftswomen at work.

Alighiero Boetti had his first US solo exhibition in New York at John Weber Gallery in 1973.

Alighiero Boetti was the subject of a retrospective in 1992 that traveled to Bonn and Munster, Germany, and Lucerne, Switzerland.

Alighiero Boetti was honored with several exhibitions after his death, most notably at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome ; the Museum fur Moderne Kunst in Vienna in 1997; the Museum fur Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main in 1998; Whitechapel Gallery, London ; and Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz.

In 1995, the Archivio Alighiero Boetti, based in Rome, was created for the issuance of certificates of authenticity for works by Boetti.