Frottage

Grattage is a surrealist painting technique that involves laying a canvas prepared with a layer of oil paint over a textured object and then scraping the paint off to create an interesting and unexpected surface

In art, automatism refers to creating art without conscious thought, accessing material from the unconscious mind as part of the creative process

A twentieth-century literary, philosophical and artistic movement that explored the workings of the mind, championing the irrational, the poetic and the revolutionary

One of the most important and influential Italian artists of the twentieth century, Alighiero Boetti (1940–1994) is renowned for the extraordinary diversity of his works. The curator of his Tate retrospective discovers ‘a world of fascinating ideas, playful and critical, political and poetic’, as he explores an oeuvre that encompassed a consuming interest in numeric, linguistic and classificatory systems – games, numbers, words, dates and sequences – in the artist’s dual role as divine shaman and public showman, and in geopolitics, which resulted in him setting up the One Hotel in Kabul and employing local craftswomen to create large embroidered maps