Alighiero Boetti  (Italian, 1940-1994) 

Alighiero Boetti (Italian, 1940–1994) was a Conceptual artist, often associated with the Arte Povera movement and best known for his series of embroidered maps. Born in Turin, Italy, Boetti left business school to become an artist, producing a wide variety of works that embraced unusual materials and processes. Throughout the 1970s and 1980s, Boetti travelled extensively in the Middle East, creating a body of work rooted in his interest in the textile arts of Afghanistan and Pakistan.

Many of these works addressed a variety of poetic and playful themes, based on folkloric anecdotes he came across in his travels. Boetti often designed textiles to be embroidered in artisan workshops, resulting in a body of work that cut across national borders, embracing traditional art forms rooted in tradition, collaboration, and ritualistic meanings of creation. From 1987 until his death, Boetti was completely absorbed in the creation of his largest and most complex tapestry, Tutto, which was created to represent the cultural diversity of the world. Although he died in 1994 before its completion, Boetti’s work continues to be written about and studied as an important paradigm of the newly international approach of contemporary artists.