Alighiero Boetti

Studio Simonis, Paris
Acquired by the present owner from the above in the mid 1990s

Turin, Galleria Civica d'Arte Moderna; Villeneuve d'Ascq, Musée d'Art Moderne; Vienna, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Alighiero Boetti 1965-1994, 1996-1997, pp. 108-109, no. 22, illustrated in colour
Frankfurt am Main, Museum für Moderne Kunst, Alighiero Boetti: Mettere al mondo il mondo, 1998, p. 39, no. 14, illustrated
London, Tate Modern; Minneapolis, Walker Art Center; Los Angeles, Museum of Contemporary Art; Washington D.C., Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Zero to Infinity: Arte Povera 1962-1972, 2001-2003, p. 202, no. 24, illustrated in colour

Exhibition Catalogue, Venice, Venice Pavilion, IL Biennale di Venezia; Alighiero Boetti. Niente da vedere niente da nascondere, 2001, p. 12, illustrated  

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality and the red are less saturated in the original and the sea has a slightly greener tonality in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. The paper has slightly yellowed with age as visible in the catalogue illustration. There are two tiny pin artist's holes in the top two corners. There is a very short vertical tear 1cm. long to the top edge located 37cm. from the top left corner as well as two very tiny tears towards the top right corner inherent to the artist's working process. There are a number of faint stains with few associated creases in places to the lower half of the map, possibly caused by the gluing process of the map to the card board underneath. There is a faint watermark towards the lower left corner as well as near the Marshall Islands and towards the right edge 20 cm. below the upper right corner. The extreme top edge of the paper is irregular in places as well as the bottom left corner.
"In response to your inquiry, we are pleased to provide you with a general report of the condition of the property described above. Since we are not professional conservators or restorers, we urge you to consult with a restorer or conservator of your choice who will be better able to provide a detailed, professional report. Prospective buyers should inspect each lot to satisfy themselves as to condition and must understand that any statement made by Sotheby's is merely a subjective, qualified opinion. Prospective buyers should also refer to any Important Notices regarding this sale, which are printed in the Sale Catalogue.
NOTWITHSTANDING THIS REPORT OR ANY DISCUSSIONS CONCERNING A LOT, ALL LOTS ARE OFFERED AND SOLD AS IS" IN ACCORDANCE WITH THE CONDITIONS OF BUSINESS PRINTED IN THE SALE CATALOGUE."

"The greatest pleasure in the world is to invent the world as it is, without inventing anything." The artist in: Exh. Cat., Villeurbanne, Le Nouveau Musée, Alighiero e Boetti, 1986, p. 36

One of the most important works from the career-defining year of 1969, Planisfero Politico by Alighiero Boetti represents the genesis of Boetti's paramount Mappa series. Aesthetically beautiful, brilliantly conceptual and politically engaged, Planisfero Politico certainly marks the culmination of Boetti's artistic output by condensing Arte Povera practices with Boetti's distinctive lyrical experimentation.

The elegant allure of Planisfero Politico resides in Boetti's simple act of taking a printed world map and colouring each country in felt-tip pen with the their respective flags, developing a precise gesture that has to become the signature technique of his later drawings. As the artist has explained :"the world is made the way it is and I have not drawn it; the flags are those that exist anyway. [...] Once the basic idea is there, the concept, then everything else is already chosen" (The artist cited in Exhibition Catalogue: Wien, Museum Moderner Kunst Stiftung Ludwig, Alighiero Boetti 1965-1994, 1996, p. 199).

Fascinated by classifying alterations in political geography, which he interpreted as a human desire to demarcate the earth, Boetti would go on to expand the concept of  Planisfero Politico into his world-renowned series of embroidered Maps. This series would bear witness to every change that affected countries, their borders and their flags and provides an extraordinary account of political geography from 1971 to the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and the historic dissolution of the Soviet Union.

In Planisfero Politico there is a visual dichotomy between the tectonic changes of Nature that have been formed through the ages and the comparatively transitory boundaries of Mankind: "In the Map, you see Nature but also how people have their dramatic influence, creating states and flags" (Jean Christophe Amman in: Exhibition Catalogue, Turin, Castello di Rivoli Museo d'Arte Contemporanea, Arte Povera in collection, 2000-01, p. 130). By laying bare the physiognomy of the earth, Boetti interrogates the supposed significance of human organization, or what Dan Fox describes as: "the inherent absurdity of imposing abstract human concepts upon the natural world, as if our efforts might reveal some Platonic essence in the landscape or in the passage of time" (Dan Fox, Alighiero e Boetti, London 2000, pp. 105-06).

The evolution of the geopolitical scene had always been a source of fascination for Boetti. Between 1967 and 1971 the artist worked on 12 Shapes since 10 June 1967 where Boetti isolated the outlines of countries that had been shaped by socio-political upheaval, such as the occupied territories of Sinai. In 1970 and together with his wife Anne-Marie Sauzeau, Boetti launched an experiment of geographic classification, where they recorded the thousand longest rivers in the world to critique what they saw as a bourgeois need for classification. In a similar vein in 1968 Boetti created a distinct Map of the City of Turin, where he indicated the residences of fellow Arte Povera artists. Emerging out of these initial projects, Planisfero Politico is Boetti's earliest employment of the universally familiar world map, which, with its highly readable scheme of bright colours, encapsulates his mature approach to these wide-ranging lines of enquiring.

The notion of territoriality and the structure of the map is a theme with which many artists have engaged. Enlisted to explain geography, delineate territory and describe one country's relationship with another, maps have been employed for centuries by cartographers and artists alike as propaganda tools and formats for political commentary. Boetti's Planisfero Politico came 8 years after Jasper Johns' Map from 1961. While Jasper Johns depicting colourful American states with undefined borders and stamp-like names, elevated the banal and commonplace to the status of fine art. and championed Pop-Art by using ready-mades, Boetti conceptually borrowed world maps in order to portray the unstable political scene during the Cold War. In 1969 when Planisfero Politico was executed, Boetti felt the political tension generated by the Cold War and translated the fear of Western countries towards the Soviet Union by colouring it with an overwhelming red.

Charged with global politic awareness Planisfero Politico is still infused with Boetti's natural sense of poetry and spontaneous inclination toward beauty. The present work embodies Boetti's artistic evolution beyond Arte Povera and his fascination with cultural 'otherness', which the artist filters through his conceptual understanding of fate and time. In the artist's own words, Boetti "invent[s] the world as it is, without inventing anything." (The artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Villeurbanne, Le Nouveau Musée, Alighiero e Boetti, 1986, p. 36).