Boetti Alighiero
Alighiero Boetti (also known as Alighiero e Boetti; December 16,
1940 – February 24, 1994) was an Italian conceptual artist,
considered to be a member of the art movement Arte Povera. He is
most famous for a series of embroidered maps of the world, Mappa,
created between 1971 and his death in 1994. Boetti's work was
typified by his notion of 'twinning', leading him to add 'e' (and)
between his names, 'stimulating a dialectic exchange between these
two selves'.
Alighiero Fabrizio Boetti was born in Turin, to Corrado Boetti, a
lawyer, and Adelina Marchisio, a violinist. Boetti abandoned his
studies at the business school of the University of Turin to work as
an artist. Already in his early years, he had profound and
wide-ranging theoretical interests and studied works on such diverse
topics as philosophy, alchemy and esoterics. Among his the preferred
authors of his youth were the German writer Hermann Hesse and the
Swiss-German painter and Bauhaus teacher Paul Klee. Boetti also had
a continuing interest in mathematics and music.
At seventeen, Boetti discovered the
works of the German painter Wols and the cut canvases of
Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana. Boetti's own works of his
late teen years, however, are oil paintings somewhat reminiscent of
the Russian painter Nicolas de Staël. At age twenty, Boetti moved to
Paris to study engraving. In 1962, while in France he met Annemarie
Sauzeau, whom he was to marry in 1964 and with whom he had two
children, Matteo (1967) and Agata (1972).
Active as an artist from the early
1960s to his premature death in 1994, 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.
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.
