ALIGHIERO E BOETTI

December 16th, 1940 – February 24th, 1994
Born in Turin, Italy

Alighiero Boetti known as Alighiero e Boetti was an Italian conceptual artist born in Turin, Italy associated with the art movement Arte Povera. Traveling to Afghanistan at the beginning of the 1970s, he was introduced to the traditional craft of embroidery, which marked a turning point in the artist’s career. 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’. His work has been the subject of numerous international exhibitions, including retrospectives at the Museo Reina Sofia in Madrid, the Tate Gallery in London and the MoMA in New York.