In the gallery all pictures by Alighiero Boetti except the last one, which was done by Mel Bochner.
Alighiero Boetti was born in Turin, Italy in the year 1940. His father was a lawyer and his mother a musician that played the violin at a professional level. Alighiero Boetti was known as a great conceptual artist who used letterform as one of his means of expression. He also garnered critical acclaim for a series done with maps that he embroidered. He worked on the series for more than twenty years of his life. Many maps are vast in size as you can see by the women walking in front of one in a gallery setting. He was a member of the Arte Povera, a radical art movement that questioned society like never before.
Below is a short clip showing the different genres the artist pursued.
A great clip showing an exhibition given at the Tate Museum of Modern Art in London, England. This clip is an interview with a curator and well worth your viewing time?
For his education Boetti was originally a business student at the University of Turin. He gave up his studies to pursue a career in the arts. When he was twenty he moved to Paris and was to study the art of engraving. He met an art critic named Annemarie Sauzeau . The couple married and had two children.
Boetti enjoyed travelling abroad even making trips to Ethiopia and the Sudan. He also visited Afghanistan and Pakistan on several occassions.
Boetti died in 1994. He had a brain tumor and was only 54 years old. He was living in Rome at the time.
I enjoy this artist and he the way he expresses himself with words. If I were to compare to him to another artist working with letters it would be Mel Bochner.
Price range info: This artist ,despite his premature death, was very prolific in his output. His embroidery works have broken the one million dollar mark selling as high as $1.44 million dollars. Works done in ink can be found from $60,000 to $100,000. Works in oils start in the low six figures. Works done using a ball point pen go for $50,000 to $150,000. Works done using cardboard range from one hundred to a few hundred thousand dollars. Boetti made some collages which start around ten thousand dollars.
Boetti had his first solo show was in 1967 in Turin at a gallery named Christian Stein. In the same year he had his first show with the Arte Poverte movement.
On many occasions Boetti was the originator of an idea, but gave up control of color to other artists. In his map series he worked with his wife as well as other artists. The map series is said to have used more than 500 artists!
I have so much respect for this artist’s abitlity to use others’ work in collaboration with his own. What a creative mind! This artist was a master of embroidery.
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