6/29/2012

Alighiero Boetti - Game Plan




Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan
July 1–October 1

The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Gallery, sixth floor. The Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium, second floor.

This retrospective, organized in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Tate Modern in London, is the largest presentation outside of Italy of works by Italian artist Alighiero Boetti (1940–1994) to date. Organized chronologically, the exhibition spans Boetti's entire career, beginning with his sculptural works, or "objects," as he preferred to call them, comprised of everyday materials including wood, cardboard, and aluminum. While Boetti is often chiefly affiliated with the Arte Povera moment, Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan considers Boetti beyond these brief years. In 1969, Boetti began exploring notions of duality and multiplicity, order and disorder, and travel and geography, and he initiated postal and map works imagining distant places. The exhibition brings together these and other works related to travel, geography, and mapping, many of which relate to his extensive trips to Afghanistan, where Boetti collaborated with local artisans to produce his most iconic monumental embroideries. This exhibition celebrates the material diversity, conceptual complexity, and visual beauty of Boetti's art, and his notion that the artist, rather than inventing, simply brings what already exists in the world into the work.