MoMa Presents Exhibit of Alighiero Boetti, 7/1

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Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan marks the largest presentation of works by Alighiero Boetti (Italian, 1940–1994) in the United States to date. A full retrospective spanning the artist's entire career, the exhibition will be on view in two locations in the Museum from July 1 to October 1, 2012.

Celebrating the material diversity, conceptual complexity, and visual beauty of Boetti's work, the exhibition brings together approximately 100 works across many mediums that address Boetti's ideas about order and disorder, non-invention, and the way in which the work is concerned with the whole world, travel, and time. Proving him to be one of the most important and influential International Artists of his generation, the exhibition focuses on several thematic threads, demonstrating the artist's interest in exploring recurring motifs in his work instead of a linear development.

In The International Council of The Museum of Modern Art Exhibition Gallery on the sixth floor, the exhibition will feature works from the first 15 years of the artist's career, while works in the Donald B. and Catherine C. Marron Atrium on the second floor are drawn from the latter part of his career, focused on Boetti's embroidered pieces and woven rugs. Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan is organized in collaboration with the Museo Reina Sofía in Madrid and the Tate Modern in London, where the exhibition was previously on view, and is organized at The Museum of Modern Art by Christian Rattemeyer, The Harvey S. Shipley Miller Associate Curator of Drawings.

Working in his hometown of Turin in the early 1960s among a close community of artists that included Luciano Fabro, Mario Merz, Giulio Paolini, and Michelangelo Pistoletto, among others, Boetti established himself as one of the leading artists of the Arte Povera movement. Organized chronologically, the MoMA exhibition will begin with his sculptural objects, comprising everyday "hardware store" materials including wooden sticks, cardboard, and fiber cement tubes. Brought together (many for the first time since Boetti's seminal exhibition at Galleria Christian Stein in Turin in 1967) and installed in a dense configuration inspired by the original clustered presentation, these early works convey the material experiments of the period and already suggest notions of measurement and chance that Boetti would play with and revise throughout his career.