Alighiero Boetti began his Biro series in 1972, in which he would conceive of a word or aphorism to be revealed as white ground on sheets of paper laboriously filled in with minutely hatched marks of ballpoint pen by scores of assistants, whom Boetti would never meet directly. This collaborative undertaking resulted in sublime monochromatic works with a variegated, textural quality, revealing the coded wordplay that preoccupied Boetti in all of his work.

Ononimo, 1973, consists of 11 panels, each rendered in undulating hatch marks of blue ballpoint pen, with the word 'Ononimo' left exposed in white at the top of each sheet. 'Ononimo', a word playfully invented by Boetti that combines the Italian words anonimo (anonymous) and omonimo (homonymous), referenced his radical notion that the authorship of a work of art is not dependent on its physical production, underscoring that much of his body of work was delegated to 'anonymous' artisans; though conversely, their roles in executing Boetti's ideas, whether with the tapestries or Biro works, are what give essence to his output. Boetti embraced the duality of 'order and disorder' in the Biro works; the structural directives he issued could be delightfully destabilized by the individualism of those executing his works. Boetti's favourite number was eleven, as its identical digits of '1' and '1' manifested his interest in the concepts of twinning and dualities. In 1968, Boetti infamously manipulated a photograph to create an image of himself holding hands with his 'twin', and in the early 1970s he began to insert an 'e' between his first and last names to become 'Alighiero e Boetti', in an attempt to dilute attachments to authorship in his work and address the omnipresence of dualities. Thus, Ononimo, one of only five 11-panel works in the series, serves as a conceptual self-portrait, the 'supreme variant of his identity', and a pristine, iconic example of this 20th century master's work.