Alighiero Boetti Italian, 1940-1994

Alighiero Boetti was born in Turin in 1940 and lived and worked in Rome, where he died in 1994. From 1968, he added an ‘e’ (Italian for ‘and’) between his first name and surname creating a double character which he used throughout his career. Boetti’s affiliation with the Arte Povera movement was brief, and by the 1970s, he stood apart from the collective movements of those times. He travelled to Afghanistan for the first time in 1971 and visited the country regularly until 1979 when the Russian Army invaded. Boetti is represented in numerous important public collections worldwide. Notable solo exhibitions have taken place at the Centre National d’Art Contemporain de Grenoble, Grenoble; Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA), Los Angeles; and the P.S.1 Contemporary Art Center, New York. A major retrospective recently took place at the Museo Nacional de Arte Centro Reina Sofia, Madrid; Tate Modern, London; and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.