This exhibition of work by Alighiero Boetti features a selection from Dia’s permanent collection alongside key loans to illuminate the defining tenets of the Conceptual artist’s expansive oeuvre. Debuting in Turin in 1967, Boetti’s early works draw on the structures and materiality of the rapidly expanding industry of postwar Italy. Sculptures made by stacking mass-produced units of industrial materials, monochrome paintings that state the trademarked name of the factory color used, and reprints of technical manuals, for instance, all deploy nearly untransformed commercially available materials.

At the turn of the 1970s, Boetti began to reinscribe the hand of the artist in the process of production, a shift that was accompanied by a broadening of his horizon from Italian society to international geopolitics. He traveled to Afghanistan and collaboratively produced tapestries that explore linguistic and numerical systems as well as the mapping of topographies, national narratives, and their internal dissonances. Balancing the processual, the linguistic, and the political with a defining interest in dichotomies and duplication, Boetti’s work contends with the materials and systems that structure subjectivities and worldviews.