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Lot Essay
A striking band of camouflage fabric stretched and hung onto the wall, Alighiero Boetti's Mimetico stands as one of the most fascinating artistic statements of Sixties Italian Art.
As a deliberate yet ironical homage to the culture of the ready-made and also of the tradition of painting, Mimetico is a durable testimony to the extraordinary effervescent situation in Turin at the end of the Sixties.
When Boetti settled in his first studio in Turin in 1966, he had never been formally trained but had acquired a clear understanding of the radical changes that art - and more particularly painting - was experiencing. Travelling throughout Europe he had developed skills that were informed by the traditional activity of Informe painting and also by Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana's subversions of painting.
An American influence, from the tradition of all-over compositions by colour-field and action painting to more radical experiments, was also to be decisive in the creation of Mimetico. After he became the star of numerous shows - especially at the Galleria Sperone in Turin and the Grand Prix winner at the Venice Biennale in 1964 - Rauschenberg's ascendancy over Italian minds had become incontestable along with his encouraging of the artist to act in the gap between art and life.
There never really had been a boundary for the young Boetti and alongside his acolyte Michelangelo Pistoletto Boetti boosted a versatile and direct apprehension of everyday life in a technique initiated in 1966 that consisted of using pre-finished industrial material. During his first show at galleria Christian Stein in January 1967, Boetti presented a series of works made of raw elements listed on the invitations as "camouflage fabric, cork latter, abestos lumber, copper, plywood, Perspex, PVC tube, wire netting, aluminium, electric cable." These works would prove to be decisive for both Boetti artistic recognition and the elaboration of his conceptual vocabulary.
Although similarities can be found with the Duchampian tradition of diverting the original meaning of a ready-made object, Boetti's strategy is different in the way that he used materials as matière premiere to create works and to emphasise the impoverished quality of his objects.
The camouflage fabric used in the Mimetico series was 'pret-a-porter' from the Italian army. Each year its pattern and colour would be modified and Boetti would simply use the new pattern for fashioning his pieces. This undoubtedly brought a notion of chance and improvisation together with Boetti's more consciously elaborated strategy.
Alongside to the other works exhibited at Stein in 1967, Mimetico emphasised the preponderance of the visual over the tactile and initiated a fundamental reflection on the notions of progression and accumulation, which formed the core of his later work. The series would become a lifetime favourite for the artist, who lovingly referred to them as his objects and more cynically as his best sellers. Mimetico's influence can perhaps be found in Andy Warhol's camouflage paintings but more interestingly it has also to be seen in Boetti's stretched tapestry and all-over compositions such as the tutti and arazzi series.
As a deliberate yet ironical homage to the culture of the ready-made and also of the tradition of painting, Mimetico is a durable testimony to the extraordinary effervescent situation in Turin at the end of the Sixties.
When Boetti settled in his first studio in Turin in 1966, he had never been formally trained but had acquired a clear understanding of the radical changes that art - and more particularly painting - was experiencing. Travelling throughout Europe he had developed skills that were informed by the traditional activity of Informe painting and also by Alberto Burri and Lucio Fontana's subversions of painting.
An American influence, from the tradition of all-over compositions by colour-field and action painting to more radical experiments, was also to be decisive in the creation of Mimetico. After he became the star of numerous shows - especially at the Galleria Sperone in Turin and the Grand Prix winner at the Venice Biennale in 1964 - Rauschenberg's ascendancy over Italian minds had become incontestable along with his encouraging of the artist to act in the gap between art and life.
There never really had been a boundary for the young Boetti and alongside his acolyte Michelangelo Pistoletto Boetti boosted a versatile and direct apprehension of everyday life in a technique initiated in 1966 that consisted of using pre-finished industrial material. During his first show at galleria Christian Stein in January 1967, Boetti presented a series of works made of raw elements listed on the invitations as "camouflage fabric, cork latter, abestos lumber, copper, plywood, Perspex, PVC tube, wire netting, aluminium, electric cable." These works would prove to be decisive for both Boetti artistic recognition and the elaboration of his conceptual vocabulary.
Although similarities can be found with the Duchampian tradition of diverting the original meaning of a ready-made object, Boetti's strategy is different in the way that he used materials as matière premiere to create works and to emphasise the impoverished quality of his objects.
The camouflage fabric used in the Mimetico series was 'pret-a-porter' from the Italian army. Each year its pattern and colour would be modified and Boetti would simply use the new pattern for fashioning his pieces. This undoubtedly brought a notion of chance and improvisation together with Boetti's more consciously elaborated strategy.
Alongside to the other works exhibited at Stein in 1967, Mimetico emphasised the preponderance of the visual over the tactile and initiated a fundamental reflection on the notions of progression and accumulation, which formed the core of his later work. The series would become a lifetime favourite for the artist, who lovingly referred to them as his objects and more cynically as his best sellers. Mimetico's influence can perhaps be found in Andy Warhol's camouflage paintings but more interestingly it has also to be seen in Boetti's stretched tapestry and all-over compositions such as the tutti and arazzi series.