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signed, titled and dated 1988-89 on the overlap

embroidered tapestry

PROVENANCE

Sperone Westwater Gallery, New York
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner
CATALOGUE NOTE

Executed in the last fifteen years of Alighero Boetti's life, the Tutto series is the apogee of the artist's unremitting, career-long quest to hone a means of artistic expression capable of representing the universal whole and all its creation.

The Tutto of the title denotes every form, every culture and every concept. Working from multifarious sources of visual stimuli - foreign newspapers, children's books, advertising hoardings - Boetti sought to appropriate a myriad of forms and figures and arrange them without prejudice or hierarchy in an unfamiliar, abstract landscape. As an organising principle each form is created in the contour of the preceding image, so that every outline contains and echoes the next form. As a result, the overall composition is not determined by the controlling hand of the artist but derives entirely from the forms themselves.

Fascinated by non-Western cultures, Boetti spent long periods in Afghanistan where he commissioned the women of Kabul to weave his tapestries, thereby investing his works with different traditions, ideas and associations. Relinquishing the selection of colours to the hand and eye of a different culture, Boetti delighted in the abstraction, loss of identity and homogenisation of forms that resulted from the varying degrees of colour fusion. While individual forms are decipherable - a standing figure, characters from the Farsi alphabet, a flying bird - the resulting image transcends the physical world in which it is anchored to encompass the incorporeal and intangible, the universal whole that Boetti sought to embrace.