Mappa
November 7, 2009 — January 23, 2010
New York: 21st Street
Gladstone Gallery and the Fondazione Alighiero e Boetti, working in close association with the Archivio Alighiero Boetti, are pleased to announce the first ever retrospective entirely dedicated to Alighiero e Boetti’s Mappa series.
During his second voyage to Afghanistan in 1971, Boetti pondered the idea of the first Mappa: He commissioned Afghan craftswomen, who following the artist’s directives, hand-embroidered a map of the world in which the geopolitical boundaries were filled with each country’s flag. This first piece began a twenty-year collaboration that continued until the artist’s premature death in 1994. Viewed as an ongoing series, they bring to light the man-made divisions drawn over the continents and chart the political realities of the world from the early 1970s through the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the USSR.
Installation
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About
Over the course of his career, Alighiero Boetti gave increasing importance to the creative concept, the investigation of culture and society through the idea. Boetti was born in Turin in 1940 and by 1966 had become associated with a group of artists whose groundbreaking work Germano Celant would feature in his exhibition “Arte Povera” in 1967. Through the use of everyday materials, the Arte Povera aesthetic sought an immediate connection with real life. These artists shared an intense interest in destabilizing the dominant structures behind the “false” realities of consumer-capitalism. In keeping with his political philosophy, Boetti renamed himself Alighiero e Boetti to expose the underlying structure present in one’s own identity as expressed in the dual nature of the self and the name. He said: “While a name is unique, a surname is already a category, a means of classification . . .” Bipolarities permeate Boetti’s thought: part and whole; half and double; full and empty; order and disorder; addition and subtraction; Alighiero and Boetti. Boetti sought throughout his career to uncover the duality of structure. Boetti’s solo exhibitions include: Stedelijk Van Abbemuseum, Eindhoven; The Venice Biennale; Kunstverein Münster; Centre National d’Art Contemporain, Grenoble; Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles; DIA Center for the Arts, New York; The Institute for Contemporary Art P.S.1 Museum, New York; Galleria Civica d’Arte Moderna e Contemporanea, Turin; Galleria Nazionale d’Arte Moderna, Rome; Museum für Moderne Kunst, Frankfurt; and Whitechapel Art Gallery, London. Alighiero e Boetti died in 1994.
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