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Tate Modern Exhibition

Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan

28 February – 27 May 2012
Alighiero Boetti exhibition at Tate Modern

Alighiero e Boetti (1940–1994) was one of the most important and influential Italian artists of the twentieth century. He was a key member of the Arte Povera group of young Italian artists in the late 1960s which was working in radically new ways using simple materials. This is the first solo show by an Arte Povera artist at Tate Modern. Boetti used industrial materials associated with Turin’s booming economy and later made works using postage stamps, biro pens, and magazine covers. His work engaged with the changing geopolitical situation of his time, much of it made on his travels to places such as Ethiopia and Guatemala and Afghanistan. Between 1971 and 1979 he set up a hotel in Kabul as an art project and created large colourful embroideries, the most famous of these were the Mappa, world maps in which each country features the design of its national flag. Highlights include works never seen in the UK such as the iconic Self-Portrait 1993, a life-size bronze cast of the artist hosing his head with a jet of water.

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TateShots: Alighiero E Boetti

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TateShots: Francesco Clemente on Alighiero Boetti

Tate Modern

Bankside
London SE1 9TG
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Dates

28 February – 27 May 2012

Sponsored by

The Alighiero Boetti Exhibition Supporters Group

The Alighiero Boetti Exhibition Supporters Group

Tate International Council

Tate International Council and Tate Patrons

In partnership with

The Independent

The Independent

Related events

Find out more

  • To Turn One's Eyes Inside Out Giuseppe Penon

    Zero to infinity: Arte Povera 1962–1972

    Zero to infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972, Tate Modern past exhibition 31 May - 19 August 2001

  • Photograph by a street photographer of Francesco Clemente with Alighiero e Boetti on the final day of their travels through Afghanistan 1974

    On the road to a state of grace

    Brooks Adams

    As Adams writes: "This is a tale of four contemporary art shamans, in a pre-9/11 world that could still entertain rosy illusions of prelapsarian time and space."

  • Boetti with Manifesto 1967 in 1970

    Giving time to time

    Mark Godfrey

    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

  • Illustrated letter sent by Alighiero e Boetti to Hans Ulrich Obrist

    'One of the most important days in my life'

    Hans Ulrich Obrist

    A long-term friend remembers his first encounter with the artist at the age of eighteen, and the subsequent effect this meeting had on the way he looks at art to this day

  • Alighiero Boetti Twins 1968 LIMITED

    Curator’s talk: Alighiero Boetti

    Curator's talk on the Boetti exhibition at Tate Modern, 21 May

  • Alighiero Boetti Column 1968 LIMITED

    Boetti and Afghanistan

    Boetti and Afganistan panel discussion, Tate Modern, 8 May 2012

  • Alberto Grifi editing the film Anna

    Alberto Grifi & Massimo Sarchielli: Anna

    Alberto Grifi & Massimo Sarcheielli's film Anna, Tate Modern, 20 May 2012

  • Artist

    Alighiero e Boetti

    1940–1994
  • Artwork

    Insicuro Noncurante

    Alighiero e Boetti
    1975
    View by appointment
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