PALM BEACH, FL.- ‘It has been said that conceptual art scorns sentiment, because at a certain historical moment it was calculated that sentimental feeling no longer made sense, but the works of Boetti, even when they are conceptual, are always an alchemy of salt and sugar, that is of common sense, intelligence, and warmth.’– Giovan Battista Salerno.

‘In Alighiero’s hands, conceptual practice became highly emotive.’ – Francesco Clemente.

Ben Brown Fine Arts is now hosting Alighiero e Boetti: Regola e Regolarsi, curated by Mark Godfrey, to be presented across the London galleries and Claridge’s ArtSpace, in the heart of Mayfair. Ben Brown Fine Arts has steadfastly exhibited Boetti’s work over the last two decades, with seven solo exhibitions and numerous group shows at both the London and Hong Kong galleries, highlighting our depth of interest and expertise in 20th century post-war Italian art. This exhibition brings together iconic examples from various periods of Boetti’s oeuvre, including Arte Povera objects, Mappe, Arazzi, Aerei, Faccine, Biro and other experimental works on paper, and a rare rug (Tappeti) and kilim. Esteemed art historian, curator and critic Mark Godfrey, a Boetti scholar who organized the seminal retrospective Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan for Tate Modern, London, which traveled on to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Museo Reina Sofía, Madrid, has conceived of this exhibition to present Boetti’s work in two distinct embodiments – Regola (‘Rules’) and Regolarsi (‘Adjustments’), as well as a private viewing space of experimental works on paper by the artist.

In the main gallery at 12 Brook’s Mews, Godfrey brings together a group of works exemplifying Boetti’s Regola (‘Rules’), elucidating the key conceptual strategies the artist explored in the late 1960s and 70s that would serve as the foundation of his future practices and investigations. The works here will demonstrate Boetti’s explorations of serial schemes and systems; his innovative approach to self-portraiture; his use of language; and his way of producing work with the assistance of unknown third parties.

Alighiero e Boetti: Regola e Regolarsi continues at Claridge’s ArtSpace, where the notion of Regolarsi (‘Adjustments’) is investigated, featuring resplendent Aerei, Biro, Mappe and Arazzi spanning the artist’s career. While Boetti’s work remained conceptually rigorous, it became more sumptuous, colourful, and expansive. The scale grew, and the material range too.

At the gallery’s private viewing space at 52 Brook’s Mews a selection of works on paper, including collages, friezes, cut-outs and other experimental pieces, will be exhibited. While Boetti employed assistants and craftspeople to produce his Biros, to print the outlines of his Mappe, and to embroider his works, he also worked alone in his studio on these kinds of paper works. He explored many techniques of printing, ink blowing, and tracing, and his paper works have a profound intimacy to them.

Born in Turin, Italy, in 1940, Alighiero Boetti was an influential member of the Arte Povera movement, though by the 1970s diverged from the collective movements of the time and forged his own unique explorations of time, space, language, mathematics, wordplay, classification and collaboration, producing one of the most fascinating and radically conceptual bodies of work of the 20th century.

Boetti first travelled to Afghanistan in 1971, where he became enamoured with the landscape and culture, and would spend much of the decade working and collaborating there. He commissioned his mosaic-like word grids (Arazzi), geopolitical maps (Mappe) and various tapestries to be embroidered by local Afghan craftswomen, first in Kabul, and following the Soviet invasion of 1979, in Peshawar, Pakistan, where many had taken refuge. Boetti would provide the blueprint for these works while he left the selection of colours and other serendipitous interpretations and flourishes up to the weavers. Boetti similarly collaborated with art students and assistants in Italy to create his Biro, Aerei and Faccine series.

In 1972, Boetti began the Biro series, a project in which others were commissioned to take turns methodically filling sheets of white paper with rows of minute hatch marks in ballpoint pen, leaving no white of the sheet exposed except for the cryptic letters and symbols Boetti had allocated to be reserved as negative space. These laborious collaborations resulted in sublime monochromatic sheets with a variegated, vibrational quality, achieved by the varying hands making the marks, and revealed the coded wordplay that preoccupied Boetti in all his work. A nomadic, intrepid traveller who not only spent time in Afghanistan, but also Guatemala, Ethiopia, Japan, Morocco and Pakistan, Boetti was fascinated by the history of air travel and aircraft imagery. In 1977, Boetti collaborated with Guido Fuga, an Italian architect and cartoonist, to produce a large-scale triptych depicting highly-detailed aeroplanes, of varying design, scale and flying direction, teeming against a blue watercolour sky, and was so enamoured of this work that he reproduced it, in varying sizes, with only the forms of the aeroplanes registering on the sheets and then had assistants fill in the areas surrounding the aeroplanes’ outlines, in biro, ink and watercolour, resulting in a broad body of work known as the Aerei series. The Aerei series encapsulates Boetti’s interest in ‘order and disorder’ and ‘bringing the world into the world’, with fighter jets, passenger planes, Concorde, cargo craft, two-seater jets, and early propeller engines flying harmoniously, and impossibly, across infinite skies, conjuring an uncanny panorama in which the artist could obsessively classify all manner of aircraft. The planes hail from either the USSR or the United States and perhaps suggest Boetti’s interest in subtle political critique through artwork, much like the displaced Afghan craftswomen would incorporate oblique political messages in Farsi in the embroidered works.

In the early 1990s, Boetti began working with new materials: rugs and kilims. Alternando da uno a cento e viceversa (‘Alternating One to One Hundred and Vice Versa’), was a series of fifty kilims produced by Boetti for a solo exhibition at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain in Grenoble, France, in 1993, each based on a complex sequencing of 100 squares, each divided into 100 squares that sequentially alternate between black and white, the graphic grid surrounded by a colourful border. Boetti's series of Tappeti, or rugs, are the last series of works the artist completed before his untimely death in 1994. Each of Boetti’s Tappeti – only eleven were executed of the one hundred planned – feature unique colour variations with kaleidoscopic iconography and text that incapsulate his life and work. Lastly, While Boetti is widely recognized for his

collaborations, often leaving the execution of his works to others, he was prolific within his own studio, creating a vast trove of works on paper that worked out a multitude of ideas, processes and themes, incorporating myriad artistic techniques including collage, frottage, stencilling, tracing, drawing, spray-painting, stamping, wordplay and text, offering a comprehensive glimpse into the complex mind of the artist.
Alighiero Boetti is represented in prestigious public and private collections worldwide. Notable solo exhibitions of his work have taken place at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; Museo Nacional de Arte Centro Reina Sofía, Madrid; Tate Modern, London; and Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.

Mark Godfrey is a curator and critic based in London. From 2007 to 2021 he was senior curator at Tate Modern, London, where he curated and co-curated shows including Alighiero Boetti Game Plan; Soul of a Nation: Art In The Age of Black Power; and retrospectives of Sigmar Polke, Roni Horn, Franz West, and Gerhard Richter. Godfrey also curated Christopher Williams: The Production Line of Happiness, a retrospective that debuted at the Art Institute of Chicago before traveling to the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. Godfrey won the Absolut Prize for Art Writing in 2015 and recently co-edited The Soul of a Nation Reader. In 2021-2022, Godfrey curated the exhibitions Laura Owens & Vincent Van Gogh at the Fondation Vincent Van Gogh, Arles; Jacqueline Humphries : jHΩ1:) at the Wexner Center for the Arts, Columbus, Ohio; and Anicka Yi’s Turbine Hall project, In Love With The World, at Tate Modern, London.