Alighiero e Boetti

Monika Sprüth and Philomene Magers are happy to present Alighiero Boetti’s work “Insicuro Noncurante” with this year’s fall exhibition.

„Insicuro Noncurante“ is a portfolio consisting of 81 numbered pages putting Alighiero Boetti’s works from between 1966 and 1975 on display. The work comprises different forms, such as original sketches and glue works, postcards and letters, as well as copies of his large format main works, to which the pages relate in versatile ways. The invitation’s image, page no. 9 in the portfolio, shows the photomontage “Gemelli”, which can be considered programmatic to an elementary aspect of Boetti’s thinking and artistic processing. It visualizes the splitting, and thus, doubling of his personality that the artist completed through his name change into Alighiero e Boetti. By this, he extended his perception of the world as a bipolar order, in which opposites interact in a synthetic order, to his own identity. Also part of the portfolio is “Manifesto” (1967/1970) with its indecipherable signs behind the names of Boetti’s artist colleagues of the Arte Povera leads its own title ad absurdum.

Numerous pages of the portfolio represent the artist’s analytical and simultaneously playful preoccupation with the by humans created orders like mathematics, language or their basic elements, numbers and letters. Sketchy plays with numbers on pattern paper are to be found as much as a version of one of his main works titled “Classificazione dei mille fiumi più lunghi del mondo“ (1970-1977), which is a classification of the thousand longest rivers of the world as a book, and at the same time expresses the impossibility of such an operation. Further, copies of his first embroidery works comissioned in Afghanistan in 1971, the year when Boetti discovered the country as his second home, letters, postcards, which he had sent to friends and himself since 1969 anticipating mail art, and a sketch-like version of the pen picture “Mettere al mondo il mondo” are part of the portfolio. Quotation marks and letter bars are drawn on pattern paper and easier to connect and decipher than on the large format images, in which the white signs seem to disperse on the pen filled background but in fact follow a distinct system. The currently presented version can be seen as a doctrinal version for learning to read Boetti’s pen pictures.

In “Insicuro Noncurante“ Boetti’s pleasure to analyze, re-compose and thus clarify systems of order is extended to his own work. It offers a personal and a comprehensive overview-type of composition of many of his most important works, as well as private small sketches. At the same time it helps to imagine how Boetti’s wall in his apartment in Rome’s district Trastevere looked like: it was covered with items that he had found an interest in, postcards, photographs, sketches and pictures by the artist himself. Much of what once was to be found on this wall is also part of “Insicuro Noncurante”.

Pressetext

Alighiero e Boetti
INSICURO NONCURANTE