Alighiero Boetti Italian, 1940-1994
Ononimo, 1973
Ballpoint pen on card
11 parts, 70 x 100 cm. (27 1/2 x 39 3/8 in.) each / 155 x 642 cm. (61 x 252 7/10 in.) total
Copyright The Artist
Further images
Created in 1973, Ononimo belongs to Alighiero Boetti’s celebrated Biro series, initiated the previous year. Among this group, Ononimo stands as the most ambitious example: one of only five executed...
Created in 1973, Ononimo belongs to Alighiero Boetti’s celebrated Biro series, initiated the previous year. Among this group, Ononimo stands as the most ambitious example: one of only five executed on this monumental scale, comprising eleven contiguous panels. Of these large-format works, three were produced in blue ballpoint pen – including one now in the Toyota Municipal Museum of Art, Japan – while two others were realised in red ink.
The Biro series marked a pivotal moment in Boetti’s practice, encapsulating his enduring fascination with collaboration, authorship, and linguistic systems. Beginning in 1972, he enlisted groups of assistants – often students – to meticulously cover sheets of paper with dense, rhythmic hatch marks made in ballpoint pen. Each participant filled the surface methodically, line by line, until the entire field was saturated with ink, save for the spaces Boetti had preordained to remain blank. These voids revealed cryptic constellations of letters, words, or symbols – enigmatic interruptions in otherwise hypnotic monochromes.
The resulting works possess a subtle yet palpable vibration, their surfaces alive with the minute variations in pressure, density, and rhythm of different hands. What might appear mechanical or uniform on first encounter is, on closer inspection, profoundly human: a collective texture of difference and repetition. The tension between the personal and the anonymous – between individual gesture and impersonal system – lies at the core of Boetti’s conceptual project.
The invented title Ononimo epitomises this paradox. A playful fusion of the Italian words anonimo (anonymous) and omonimo (homonymous), it encapsulates Boetti’s radical rethinking of authorship. For him, the artist’s role was not to execute but to conceive: to devise a system through which others could bring an idea into being. Yet while Boetti delegated much of his production to unnamed collaborators – Afghan embroiderers, students, or hired assistants – their collective labour was not secondary. On the contrary, it animated his ideas, granting them material and poetic life.
At the same time, Ononimo mirrors Boetti’s own dual sense of identity: the coexistence of the “self” and the “other” within the same person. Throughout his career, he cultivated this theme of doubling – most famously in Gemelli (1968), a photographic self-portrait in which he appears hand-in-hand with his identical twin, or through his signature modification of his name to “Alighiero e Boetti,” inserting the conjunction “and” to suggest a dialogue between two selves. This notion of twinning extends seamlessly into his collaborative processes, where authorship becomes plural and selfhood becomes distributed.
The format of Ononimo – eleven sequential panels – embodies this principle both conceptually and formally. Each panel is ostensibly identical in design yet unique in execution, its subtle variations recording the individuality of its maker. For Boetti, the number eleven held particular significance: visually a doubling of the number one, it symbolised unity achieved through duality, a mystical equilibrium between sameness and difference. In Ononimo, this numerological symbolism converges with his broader metaphysical vision – an art grounded in repetition, collaboration, and the endless play between order and chance.
Through its monumental scale and meditative intensity, Ononimo distils the essence of Boetti’s practice in the early 1970s: an art that is at once conceptual and sensuous, cerebral and collective. It stands as a landmark in post-war European art – a work that transforms the simplest of tools, a biro pen, into a vehicle for reflection on authorship, identity, and the generative potential of shared creation.
The Biro series marked a pivotal moment in Boetti’s practice, encapsulating his enduring fascination with collaboration, authorship, and linguistic systems. Beginning in 1972, he enlisted groups of assistants – often students – to meticulously cover sheets of paper with dense, rhythmic hatch marks made in ballpoint pen. Each participant filled the surface methodically, line by line, until the entire field was saturated with ink, save for the spaces Boetti had preordained to remain blank. These voids revealed cryptic constellations of letters, words, or symbols – enigmatic interruptions in otherwise hypnotic monochromes.
The resulting works possess a subtle yet palpable vibration, their surfaces alive with the minute variations in pressure, density, and rhythm of different hands. What might appear mechanical or uniform on first encounter is, on closer inspection, profoundly human: a collective texture of difference and repetition. The tension between the personal and the anonymous – between individual gesture and impersonal system – lies at the core of Boetti’s conceptual project.
The invented title Ononimo epitomises this paradox. A playful fusion of the Italian words anonimo (anonymous) and omonimo (homonymous), it encapsulates Boetti’s radical rethinking of authorship. For him, the artist’s role was not to execute but to conceive: to devise a system through which others could bring an idea into being. Yet while Boetti delegated much of his production to unnamed collaborators – Afghan embroiderers, students, or hired assistants – their collective labour was not secondary. On the contrary, it animated his ideas, granting them material and poetic life.
At the same time, Ononimo mirrors Boetti’s own dual sense of identity: the coexistence of the “self” and the “other” within the same person. Throughout his career, he cultivated this theme of doubling – most famously in Gemelli (1968), a photographic self-portrait in which he appears hand-in-hand with his identical twin, or through his signature modification of his name to “Alighiero e Boetti,” inserting the conjunction “and” to suggest a dialogue between two selves. This notion of twinning extends seamlessly into his collaborative processes, where authorship becomes plural and selfhood becomes distributed.
The format of Ononimo – eleven sequential panels – embodies this principle both conceptually and formally. Each panel is ostensibly identical in design yet unique in execution, its subtle variations recording the individuality of its maker. For Boetti, the number eleven held particular significance: visually a doubling of the number one, it symbolised unity achieved through duality, a mystical equilibrium between sameness and difference. In Ononimo, this numerological symbolism converges with his broader metaphysical vision – an art grounded in repetition, collaboration, and the endless play between order and chance.
Through its monumental scale and meditative intensity, Ononimo distils the essence of Boetti’s practice in the early 1970s: an art that is at once conceptual and sensuous, cerebral and collective. It stands as a landmark in post-war European art – a work that transforms the simplest of tools, a biro pen, into a vehicle for reflection on authorship, identity, and the generative potential of shared creation.