Bringing together approximately one hundred works across eight galleries, the exhibition offers an expansive survey of one of the most influential artists of the post-war period. Spanning more than twenty-five years, from the late 1960s to the early 1990s, it traces the full arc of Boetti’s artistic trajectory and highlights the breadth and complexity of his practice.
Conceived as a constellation that invites viewers to inhabit the space between idea and form, order and disorder, Alighiero Boetti reflects the artist’s enduring interest in duality, systems and process. From his early works rooted in simple materials and elementary structures as proposed by the Arte Povera group, to later collaborative and conceptually layered projects, the presentation foregrounds the internal coherence of a practice that consistently tested its own premises while embracing chance, repetition and shared authorship as generative forces.
The exhibition opens with a room devoted to self-portraiture and the question of identity, addressing Boetti’s lifelong engagement with the notion of the double. This inquiry found its clearest expression in 1972, when he adopted the dual signature “Alighiero e Boetti.” Works such as Autoritratto (1969) and Gemelli (1968) explore identity as split, mirrored, and multiplied, while the artist’s use of paired forms and serial structures introduces a logic of duality that would remain fundamental to his practice.
As the exhibition unfolds, this logic of doubling expands into broader systems of language, geography and time. Boetti’s work increasingly turns toward structures that organise vision and knowledge while simultaneously exposing their instability. His sustained engagement with mapping reflects an interest in orientation, distance and the circulation of information, labour and modes of production across cultures. Beginning in the early 1970s, the Biro drawings (1972-), together with the embroidered Ricami (1971-) and Mappe (1971), produced through long-standing collaborations with Afghan artisans, exemplify a deliberate displacement of authorship. Boetti established the conceptual framework and governing parameters of each work, while its execution unfolded through other hands, allowing difference, duration and contingency to become integral to both form and meaning.
The latter sections of the exhibition focus on the Aerei (from 1977-), Calendari (1974-, and the serial, conceptually rigorous works on paper produced during the 1980s and early 1990s. In the Aerei, permutational structures generate disorienting fields in which images of flight are subjected to systems that are at once methodical and unstable, allowing order and chaos to collide within a rational, classified framework. The steady accumulation of dates in the Calendari, alongside the repeated deployment of graphic elements across his works on paper, similarly registers time as both measure and material. Taken together, these series articulate an ongoing process in which systems are set in motion only to expose their own limits, staging a sustained, often playful exchange between control and contingency.
The exhibition benefitted from the support and collaboration of the Archivio Alighiero Boetti. It is conceived to present artist’s journey with clarity and balance, allowing viewers to trace the evolution of his ideas and to engage with the enduring tensions at the core of his practice. Structure and chance, autonomy and collaboration, system and play are held in a productive relationship, revealing a body of work that remains both rigorous and open, and consistently attentive to the complexity of the world it reflects.
