LONDON.- Ben Brown Fine Arts London opened Alighiero e Boetti: Embellishing the Sky, taking place from 19 March to 23 May 2025. Organised by curator Elena Geuna in collaboration with architect and cartoonist Guido Fuga and supported by the Archivio Alighiero Boetti in Rome, this extraordinary show offers a rare opportunity to experience one of the most defining, visually striking, and conceptually rich series by Boetti: the Aerei. Comprising works seldom seen and united for the first time in London, the exhibition is an invitation to witness the radical vision of one of the 20th century’s most evocative and innovative conceptual artists.
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Alighiero Boetti (1940–1994) remains a pivotal figure in contemporary art, his career charting a shift from Arte Povera’s material interrogations in the 1960s to a broader exploration of conceptual and collaborative practices. Renouncing the idea of a singular artistic identity, he adopted the name “Alighiero e Boetti” in the early 1970s, an intellectual manoeuvre that fractured the self into dualities of personal and public, individual and collective. His art is a labyrinthine exploration of global interconnectedness, systems of classification, and the inherent tension between structure and spontaneity.
The Aerei series embodies these conceptual concerns with remarkable clarity. The works are characterised by a permutational and disorienting structure, where chaos and order collide within a system that is paradoxically rational and classified. Created during a period of rapid expansion in commercial air travel, the series also reflects the era’s electrifying sense of possibility and adventure, capturing the global enthusiasm for a world newly connected through the skies.
In 1977, Boetti collaborated with Guido Fuga to produce a triptych of aeroplanes suspended in flight against an expansive, infinite sky. Passenger jets, fighter planes, cargo aircraft, Concordes, and early propeller-driven models are depicted in mid-air, their forms frozen in a fleeting yet boundless choreography. The compositions present a constellation of planes intersecting in the sky without hierarchy or clear spatial orientation. Executed through an intricate process involving photographic templates, watercolour washes, and biro ink, these works exemplify Boetti’s mastery of hybridisation, where disparate media converge into a single, cohesive whole. Boetti’s choice to reproduce, enlarge, and transform the compositions over time – frequently engaging assistants in the production process – reaffirms his conception of art as a collaborative, open-ended dialogue, perpetually evolving and resisting closure.
Central to the exhibition is Boetti’s historic pencil drawing Aerei (1977), part of a series of drawings that mark the inception of his collaboration with Fuga. This delicate and intimate work reveals Boetti’s conceptual brilliance as he maps a choreography of aircraft, their forms caught in a vortex-like spiral. The planes, each meticulously rendered, appear to emerge from the confines of the picture plane, enlarging and advancing towards the viewer with hypnotic momentum.
The exhibition also features Aerei (1979), a seminal example of Boetti’s works in ballpoint pen, where the background is a dazzling field of blue Biro pen, applied by studio assistants. The seemingly endless undulations of ink shimmer with a dynamic rhythm, the irregularities of the medium enlivening the surface. Against this dense and textural expanse, the white planes soar, their stark silhouettes in sharp relief. The tension between the intricate background and the reserved simplicity of the aircraft imbues the composition with a conceptual elegance, encapsulating Boetti’s mastery of juxtaposition and his unerring sense of balance.
The quieter harmony of Cieli ad Alta Quota (1988) offers a counterpoint to the series’ more dynamic examples. In this work the composition softens: the pale, striated bands of blue suggest the serene expanse of a tranquil sky, viewed as if from the window of a plane. Fewer aircraft populate the scene, and the ethereal quality of the faded tones evokes a profound sense of infinity. This work exemplifies Boetti’s ability to evoke vastness and stillness, drawing the viewer into a meditative encounter with the sublime.
The Aerei series is deeply personal, reflecting Boetti’s nomadic existence and frequent travels to locales as diverse as Afghanistan, Guatemala, Japan, and Morocco. At the same time, the series assumes a geopolitical dimension, with the aircraft hailing predominantly from the USSR and the USA – two Cold War superpowers locked in opposition. Yet, in Boetti’s compositions, these planes coexist harmoniously, floating in an imagined space unbound by territorial divides. Like his celebrated Mappa, the Aerei works project a utopian vision: a world without borders, where difference becomes a source of cohesion rather than conflict.
Visitors are invited to encounter the confluence of media, scale, and conceptual rigor that defines the Aerei series, while immersing themselves in the enduring relevance of Boetti’s visionary and profoundly humanistic practice. Alighiero e Boetti: Embellishing the Sky offers a profound insight into the mind of an artist whose work continues to illuminate the intricacies of our increasingly globalised world.
Born in Turin in 1940, Alighiero Boetti spent much of his life in Rome until his death in 1994, leaving behind a legacy of artistic innovation unparalleled in Western post-war contemporary art. Boetti’s diverse body of work was deeply shaped by his fascination with classification systems, leading to meticulous explorations and reinterpretations of organisational structures across various mediums. Though initially associated with Arte Povera, Boetti’s art defied easy categorisation reflecting his scepticism toward formal artistic movements. In 1972, he distanced himself from Arte Povera upon relocating to Rome, emerging as a leading figure in conceptual art. Adopting the moniker “Alighiero e Boetti”(Alighiero and Boetti), he symbolised the dualities and collaboration within his own persona. Boetti’s exploration of dualities and binary oppositions, such as order and disorder, individual and collective, and known and unknown, aimed to unveil the interconnectedness of seemingly contradictory forces. Influenced by the changing geopolitical situation of his time, labour dynamics, and Islamic philosophies, particularly Sufism, Boetti expanded his practice by engaging skilled artisans, notably from Kabul, Afghanistan, and later Peshawar, Pakistan, to execute his concepts. Through mediums including drawing, painting, sculpture, embroidery, weaving, mail art, and conceptual practices, Boetti investigated an ever-evolving global perspective, embracing time, space, dimensionality, and cultural exchange as integral facets of his oeuvre.
Boetti participated in the Venice Biennale several times and was the subject of a posthumous tribute at the 49th Venice Biennale in 2001. Notable solo exhibitions have taken place at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, Grenoble; Museum of Contemporary Art (MoCA), Los Angeles; the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York; Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin; Whitechapel Gallery, London; Contemporary Arts Museum, Houston. Major recent retrospective Game Plan has taken place at the Museo Nacional de Arte Centro Reina Sofía, Madrid; Tate Modern, London; and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York, in 2012. Boetti is represented in numerous important public collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York; Museo d’Arte Moderna di Bologna (MAMBo), Bologna; and the Centre Pompidou, Paris.
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