Alighiero Boetti

Galleria Melesi, Lecco
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in the 1990s

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the overall tonality is deeper and richer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a few loose threads throughout.
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 Mappa, executed in 1984, is an extraordinary example of Alighiero Boetti's most celebrated body of work, the climactic achievement of his career. Embroidered with vibrant hues, Mappa is a joyful explosion of colours and shapes, where the serene pale expanse of the blue seas and oceans creates an elegant backdrop for a kaleidoscopic ensemble of the national flags manipulated to fit within their borders. Testifying to the communicative primacy of images over written language, and invoking flag imagery as an early global symbolic system, Mappa explores the concerns with language, heterogeneity and order that define Boetti's highly conceptual and visually stunning oeuvre.

In 1969, Boetti took a printed world map and coloured and patterned the countries with the hues of their respective flags, creating the first Mappa on paper, Planisfero Politico. 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, Vienna, 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. As observed by Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Boetti's series of Mappe "act as a metaphor for the fluidity of human relationships and communities" (Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, Arte Povera, London 1999, p. 85).

The stunning embroidered Mappe, executed first in Afghanistan and then in Pakistan after 1988, illuminate Boetti's perceived separation between conception and execution. For Boetti, the artist was the creative force, generating ideas and conceiving designs, the execution of which he would delegate to others. Rather than indicating technical weakness, in fact, Boetti strongly believed in the plurality of the creative process and always considered suggestions from those who worked with him. His playful choice to be known as "Alighiero e Boetti" - "Alighiero and Boetti" - testifies to his interest in creating art with multiple authors. Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist has described the revolutionarily global outlook that Boetti applied to his process: "Boetti told me on that first encounter that in our time the art world would become much more of a polyphony of centres. It would go beyond Western art. He made me understand that globalisation would change the art world forever; yet at the same time we had a responsibility not just to embrace it, but to work with globalisation in the way that it produces difference by resisting homogenisation. You see this idea in his maps" (Hans Ulrich Obrist, 'One of the Most Important Days in My Life: Alighiero Boetti at Tate Modern', Tate Etc., Issue 24, Spring 2012).

The present Mappa was designed by Alighiero Boetti in 1983 in his studio in Trastevere in Rome and subsequently sent to Kabul, Afghanistan to be embroidered as the artist had been unable to visit the country since the 1979 Soviet invasion. As observed by Annemarie Sauzeau, the text included in the Mappe of 1983 represents the artist's challenge and protest against the military occupation that did not allow him to return to his beloved Kabul (cited in: Jean-Christophe Ammann, Alighiero Boetti, Catalogo Generale, Vol. I, Milan 2009, p. 47). In late 1984 he was forced to relocate production to Afghan refugee camps in Pakistan; the present Mappa is thus one of the last in this series created in Kabul. Through an accident of design that undoubtedly suited Boetti's taste for irony and surprise, the present work colouristically establishes the power blocks acting upon his Mappe's production: the capitalist West and U.S.S.R. each dominate the scheme in red and white, vying for supremacy, whilst the panoply of pigments in the global South and Middle East cumulatively signify the non-aligned states.

Mappa results from Boetti's masterful 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 enquiry. 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 first embroidered Mappa came ten years after Jasper Johns' Map of 1961. While Jasper Johns depicted colourful American States with undefined borders and stamp-like names, elevating the banal and commonplace to the status of fine art and championed Pop Art by using ready-mades, Boetti borrowed world maps in order to portray conceptually the evolution of the political scene during the Cold War.

Charged with global political awareness, Mappa is 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, "I invent the world as it is, without inventing anything" (the artist cited in: Exhibition Catalogue, Villeurbanne, Le Nouveau Musée, Alighiero e Boetti, 1986, p. 36).