Alighiero Boetti - Game plan.(English version)

The catalogue, published by the three institutions that took part on this project, contains more than the hundred works gathered for the exhibition, encompassing Boetti’s entire artistic trajectory, since 1966 to his early death in 1994. After a long period of study and documentation, the curators, with the support of the Archivio and the Fondazione Alighiero Boetti, have made a careful selection, focusing on displaying the artist as one of the most fascinating and influential figures in the second half of the 20th century. It includes essays from the curators in addition to texts by other authors.

Alighiero Boetti (1940-1994), who identified with arte povera early in his career but soon distanced himself from this movement, was a prolific, unclassifiable artist who, trying to avoid any form of artistic self absorption, explored different modes and degrees of collaboration throughout his career. His oeuvre can be placed within the context of relational aesthetics and in his art notions such as multiplicity, duality and division play a key role (thus his decision in 1972 to starting signing his work Alighiero e Boetti) and a balance is sought between the intellectual and the sensible, order and disorder, individuality and collectivity. Fusing conceptual rigour, a vocation towards the experimental and a playful spirit, Boetti always allows chance and coincidence to influence his work. His work, strongly poetic and iconic, uses a wide range of techniques and tools – from drawing and painting to mail art or the production of handicrafts – and it conceives of the spectator as an accomplice or even a playmate.
Lynne Cooke, Mark Godfrey, Christian Rattemeyer, Claire Gilman, Jason E. Smith, Bruno Corà