Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan

by Claire Gilman and Jason Smith
edited by Christian Rattemeyer, Lynne Cooke, and Mark Godfrey

Published to accompany the first large-scale retrospective of Alighiero Boetti’s work outside Italy in over a decade, this volume presents the most comprehensive overview of the artist’s career to date. Covering all periods of Boetti’s broad oeuvre—including early sculptural experiments associated with the Arte Povera movement, conceptual and ephemeral projects of the 1970s and the monumental embroideries and tapestries he fabricated up to his death—this richly illustrated catalogue is structured as a typology of the artist’s body of work rather than a chronological progression.

Essays by curators from the Reina Sofia, Madrid, the Tate Modern, London and The Museum of Modern Art, New York, address recurrent themes in Boetti’s work such as travel and geography, time, order and disorder and singularity and multitude, while contributions by scholars examine his early influences and his relationship to the cultural, political, and social spheres of Italy and Afghanistan in the 1970s and 1980s.

This volume celebrates the material diversity, conceptual complexity and visual beauty of Boetti’s work, proving that he is one of the most important and influential artists of his generation.

Hardcover | 290 pages | The Museum of Modern Art, New York | 2011