Obituaries: Alighiero e Boetti

Alighiero e Boetti, 53, an Artist Who Mixed Disparate Elements
By ROBERTA SMITH
Published: April 26, 1994 in the New York Times

Alighiero e Boetti, an Italian Conceptual artist who saw his work as a collaboration between different people, cultures and disciplines, died on Sunday at his home in Rome. He was 53.

The cause was brain cancer, said Gianenzo Sperone, whose gallery in Rome represented the artist for most of his career.

Mr. Boetti was born in Turin in 1940. Largely self-educated as an artist, Mr. Boetti had his first solo exhibition in Turin in 1966 and was briefly associated with the Arte Povera movement. Drawn to nontraditional techniques, he soon evolved a more poetic, idiosyncratic vision that brought together such unlikely elements as geography and embroidery, or made extensive use of the common ballpoint pen. After traveling to Afghanistan in 1970, he began having local craftsmen translate various motifs, including big, patchwork-like world maps and invented aphorisms, into dense, embroidered surfaces and, later, into kilim rugs. Collaborative artworks so appealed to him that he took "e," the Italian word for and, as his middle name to suggest two people. A List of Rivers his most ambitious project, a version of which was recently acquired by the Museum of Modern Art, is a large embroidered piece titled "The First Thousand Rivers of the World." In characteristically blocky letters, this work spells the names of the world's 1,000 longest rivers in descending order of length. It is based on a list that required more than seven years of research by Mr. Boetti and his first wife, Anne Marie Sauzeau, an art critic, and that is known to many scientists as the Boetti List.

Mr. Boetti, who had his first New York solo show at the John Weber Gallery in SoHo in 1973, showed his work throughout Europe and is represented in public collections around the world. A large exhibition of his work is planned by the Dia Center for the Arts in Chelsea for October.

He is survived by his wife, Caterina; two sons, Giordano and Matteo, both of Rome, and a daughter, Agata, of Paris.