Alighiero Boetti (1940–1994) was no doubt one of Italy’s most creative and prolific artists of the second half of the 20th century. A highlight of the contemporary art auction in May is a piece from his famous Biro series.

Alighiero Boetti often took up contradictory positions during his lifetime, which prompted the art historian Achille Bonito Oliva on the recent occasion of a retrospective at the MAXXI Museum in Rome to describe him as a complex, chameleon-like character and fine intellectual. Boetti’s divisiveness is expressed not least in his signature, “Alighiero e Boetti” (“Alighiero and Boetti”), as if by dividing his name he wanted to point to diverging identities united in one person.

The Turin-born artist defies classification within the boundaries of a single art movement. His œuvre spans more than 30 years in which Boetti oscillated between different movements in an extremely eclectic way: from Arte Povera in his early creative period to Mail Art, to more conceptual approaches and back to traditional painting as well as arts and crafts. Although drawn to many styles, Boetti rejected overly romantic or transfigured notions of the artist and refused to see himself through such a lens.

In the 1970s, Boetti was one of the first Italian artists to turn his attention to the mysterious realm of the Middle East and Central Asia, establishing particularly close ties with Afghanistan.