While Alighiero Boetti is most widely recognized for his conceptual works - Arazzi, Mappe, Biros - typically outsourced to collaborators, there exists a vast treasure trove of works on paper...
While Alighiero Boetti is most widely recognized for his conceptual works - Arazzi, Mappe, Biros - typically outsourced to collaborators, there exists a vast treasure trove of works on paper he created privately, in his studio, from the late 1970s onward, to which this work belongs.
In Senza Titolo, c. 1981, Boetti utilized a spray-painting technique to stencil a vast array of objects found in his studio, including dice, paperclips and other banal objects, as well as small cut-outs of himself, animals and airplanes - the lexicon of iconography that appear in so many of his works. The work illuminates Boetti's obsession with classifications and cataloguing, and his notions of the omnipresent duality of 'order and disorder'. Senza Titolo is a work on paper clearly related to Boetti's iconic embroidered Tutto series, in its jigsaw puzzle-like arrangement of myriad imagery, celebrating the sheer diversity of objects and items that contributed to the artist's world.
Mark Godfrey addresses both the whimsy and complexity of Boetti's ingenious works on paper, "he deployed many of the practices associated with childhood drawing and paper work - blow-painting, stenciling, tracing, basic origami and so on - so that these works, while deeply anti-subjective, at the same time have the delightful character of the early-years school art class."
Galleria de' Foscherari, Bologna Private Collection, Rome
Exhibitions
London, Ben Brown Fine Arts, Alighiero e Boetti, Regola e Regolarsi, curated by Mark Godfrey, 2 June - 31 July 2023
Publications
Mark Godfrey, Alighiero Boetti, Catalogo Generale, Opere su Carta, Piccoli Ricami, Edizioni, Re-Made 1980-1987, Milan 2022, vol.III/2a, p. 177, no. 1787, illustrated in colour
Courtesy of Ben Brown Fine Arts
Copyright The Artist
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