(feb. 29) – Yesterday was the vernissage of the exhibition “Alighiero Boetti: a game plan”, curated at Tate Modern by Mark Godfrey and with the collaboration of Pasquale Leccese. Organized chronologically, the exhibition – already in Madrid and New York – will span Boetti’s entire career beginning with his sculptural works, or objects as he preferred to call them, comprised of everyday materials including wood, cardboard, and aluminum. “A Game Plan” will be the first large-scale retrospective of Boetti’s work to be held outside Italy in over a decade highlighting his often playful exploration of numeric, linguistic and classificatory systems. The most famous of these works is “Mappa”, world maps in which each country is coloured with its national flag, record political change across the globe from 1971 to 1994, charting the independence of African states and the break-up of the USSR. The exhibition also explores the ways in which Boetti worked with exiled Afghans to articulate their political ambitions during the years of the Soviet occupation. His works will be on show until May 29th. (Peg)
THE CONCEPTUAL ART OF ALIGHIERO BOETTI
Alighiero E Boetti (1940-1994) was one of the most important and influential Italian artists of the twentieth century. He was a key member of the Arte Povera group of young Italian artists in the late 1960s which was working in radically new ways using simple materials. This will be the first solo show by an Arte Povera artist at Tate Modern. Boetti used industrial materials associated with Turin’s booming economy and later made works using postage stamps, biro pens, and magazine covers. His work engaged with the changing geopolitical situation of his time, much of it made on his travels to places such as Ethiopia and Guatemala and Afghanistan.
