Alighiero Boetti

Galleria Toselli, Milan
Acquired directly from the above by the present owner in 1985

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate, although the white is warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good and original condition.
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Executed in 1984, Mappa is a gorgeous and strikingly rendered exemplar of Boetti’s most celebrated and important series. Combining the textural appeal of silky embroidery threads with an alluring and idiosyncratic use of colour, Mappa evinces Boetti’s ability to produce objects of beauty via extended, global networks of artistic activity. Conceived of by Boetti and later fabricated by Afghan embroiderers in Kabul and later in Peshawar, the Mappa evince Boetti’s thorough commitment to embracing elements of chance, cosmopolitanism, and collaboration. The present work, characterised by its rich purple seas, has remained in a single private collection since 1985.

The present Mappa departs from artistic realism by depicting the oceans in a deep purple tone. Bodies of water vary in colour throughout the Mappa, encompassing yellow, green, black, pink and grey, alongside a majority executed in blue. The black Mappa (1989) in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York, is a notable example. Whilst the colours within flags were proscribed, the oceans were not accompanied by specific instructions and thus subject to diverging inclinations or interpretations by the embroiderers. Likely Boetti had assumed its proper colour was obvious, as he employed the Robinson projection map, which centred Greenwich and served as the standard Western depiction of the earth. Yet as Tate Modern curator Mark Godfrey has noted, this outline was embellished “by people who did not see the world from this perspective, and who often did not even recognize the image they were fabricating as an image of the world” (Exhibition Catalogue, London, Tate Modern, Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan, 2012, p. 168).

When the earliest unusually coloured Mappa arrived at Boetti’s Italian studio in 1979, Boetti was delighted by how this cross-cultural miscommunication perfectly realised his conceptual desire to curate the unexpected and orchestrate global encounters. Boetti said: “[t]heir choices of colour from the designs of my colour schemes resulted in the combinations of colour possibilities that were impossible to predict. The element of surprise is like the disorder invading the formal order of the grid” (the artist quoted in: Ibid., p. 166). If the iconography of the national flags suggests the artificial systems of division that humans impose upon the earth, then the gaily coloured seas represent a place for creativity and freedom sheltered from the constraints of patriotic identity, evincing truly international waters.

In 1971, Boetti had first arranged for canvases bearing the outlines of a world map to be colourfully embroidered at the Royal School of Embroidery in Kabul. But the fine Bokhara stitch and thin thread employed in this studio necessitated incredibly long production times, so Boetti established a new system in partnership with his Afghan friend Dastaghir, who relayed instructions to Fatimah and Habibah, each themselves manager of a team of female embroiderers. Out of this structure, Boetti formed warm friendships with Dastaghir and the men with whom he communicated directly in Afghanistan, whilst remaining completely isolated from the women who stitched his works. Some Mappa carry Persian texts around the border, devised by the male supervisors, which express their affection for Boetti as a patron. Along the top and bottom of the present Mappa, the Persian lines read: “Alighiero Boetti is sitting in an Afghan house, looking at the earth from the window” and “Alighiero Boetti is sitting in an Afghan house, looking at the sky from the window.” These verses paint a poetic vision of Boetti restored back to Afghanistan as if the Russian invasion had not occurred, and illustrate the deep connection that his Afghan colleagues perceived to exist between Boetti and their native land.

The prescience of Boetti’s cosmopolitan approach to art production has been described by Curator Hans Ulrich Obrist, a life-long friend of the artist. He has recalled: “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, available online).