FTN-blog

Another artist who really died too young was Alighiero Boetti. One of those artists who you learn to appreciate over the years. At first glance you walk past his paintings, but when you encounter them more and more in museum s and sometimes in art galleries you learn to appreciate them and now i stop at every one of them i encounter. You are first struck by their graphic quality and later by the consistent high quality of these large canvasses and in many cases they are a source of inspiration for other artists:

left : Alighiero e Boeti . right : Kang-Ik Joong

and left Alighiero e Boetti and Right: Otto Egberts from Schaamstreken 4

At one time there was a nice Alighiero e Boetti catalogue available at the  De Slegte . Without knowing that Franz Kaiser was the curator for this exhibition in Grenoble , i bought a stack of these catalogues of which a few copies still remain and are available at www.ftn-books.com

Here is a short biography i found on the internet Boetti which proves that he is important and deserves his place amonmg other great Italian artists

Alighiero Boetti was born in Turin, to Corrado Boetti, a lawyer, and Adelina Marchisio, a violinist. Boetti abandoned his studies at the business school of the University of Turin to work as an artist. Already in his early years, he had profound and wide-ranging theoretical interests and studied works on such diverse topics as philosophy, alchemy and esoterics. Among the preferred authors of his youth were the German writer Hermann Hesse and the Swiss-German painter and Bauhaus teacher Paul Klee. Boetti also had a continuing interest in mathematics and music.

At seventeen, Boetti discovered the works of the German painter Wols and the cut canvases of Argentine-Italian artist Lucio Fontana. Boetti’s own works of his late teen years, however, are oil paintings somewhat reminiscent of the Russian painter Nicolas de Staël. At age twenty, Boetti moved to Paris to study engraving. In 1962, while in France he met art critic and writer Annemarie Sauzeau, whom he was to marry in 1964 and with whom he had two children, Matteo (1967) and Agata (1972). Working in his hometown of Turin in the early 1960s amidst a close community of artists that included Luciano Fabro, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, and Michelangelo Pistoletto, among others, Boetti established himself as one of the leading artists of the Arte Povera movement. From 1974 to 1976, he travelled to Guatemala, Ethiopia, Sudan. Boetti was passionate about non-western cultures, particularly of central and southern Asia, and travelled to Afghanistan and Pakistan numerous times in the 1970s and 1980s, although Afghanistan became inaccessible to him following the Soviet invasion in 1979. In 1975, he went back to New York.

Active as an artist from the early 1960s to his premature death in 1994, Boetti developed a significant body of diverse works that were often both poetic and pleasing to the eye while at the same time steeped in his diverse theoretical interests and influenced by his extensive travels.

He died of a brain tumour in Rome in 1994 at the age of 53.