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Alighiero Boetti was one of the most inventive and influential figures of post-war Italian art. His conceptual practice explored order and disorder, authorship, language, geography and time, creating works through a combination of rigorous structures and chance.

Born in Turin, Italy in 1940, Boetti emerged alongside a generation of artists challenging the conventions of traditional art-making. In the late 1960s, the artist became associated with the Arte Povera movement, which embraced unconventional processes and everyday materials in opposition to the commercialised contemporary gallery system. This approach is exemplified by Colonna (1968), a sculpture made from a stack of paper doilies. The work sold at Christie’s for £2.4 million in 2014, achieving what was then the world-record price for the artist at auction.

However, by the early 1970s, Boetti had distanced himself from the Arte Povera label. After moving to Rome in 1972, he established himself as a leading conceptual artist and adopted the name ‘Alighiero e Boetti’ (Alighiero and Boetti) to reflect his interest in duality and the multiplicity of the self. The artist once said, ‘While a name is unique, a surname is already a category, a means of classification...’ This idea of doubling became central to his practice, in which opposites — order and chaos, artist and maker, East and West — exist in dynamic balance.

From 1971, Boetti travelled extensively to Afghanistan, where he conceived his celebrated Mappe (1971–1994) — embroidered world maps in which each country is depicted in the colours of its national flag. Created by Afghan embroiderers and continually updated to reflect geopolitical change, the works are both historical records and poetic reflections on the instability of political identity. Collaboration, repetition and the accumulation of time also define his embroidered text works known as Arazzi, alongside his Biro series. Throughout his career, Boetti exhibited at the Venice Biennale, the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles and the Whitechapel Art Gallery in London. He died in 1994, aged 53.