Alighiero Boetti

Acquired directly from the artist by the present owner in 1983

Colour: The colours in the catalogue illustration are fairly accurate although the overall tonality is slightly warmer in the original. Condition: This work is in very good condition. Close inspection reveals a few, minor and stable loose threads, which are inherent with the artist's choice of media.
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Archetypal of the climactic achievement of the artist's career, Mappa, executed in 1983, is an extraordinarily elegant example of Alighiero Boetti's celebrated eponymous body of work.  Intricately sewn with vibrant hues against a stunning white embroidered background, Mappa is a joyful explosion of colours and shapes within a serene pale expanse of sea and ocean. With this work Boetti delivers a simultaneously tranquil and kaleidoscopic ensemble of flags manipulated to fit within the geographical delineation of the world's borders. Boetti's commanding ensemble is a magnificently elegant yet politically perspicacious comment on the ever changing national climate of our global landscape.

The notion of territoriality and the structure of the map is a theme with which many artists have continually engaged. Enlisted to explain geography, delineate territory and denote inter-continental boundary relationships, maps and flags have been employed for centuries by cartographers and artists alike as propaganda tools and formats for political commentary. Famously employed in the oeuvre of Jasper Johns, most overtly in his Map from 1961, Boetti's first embroidered Mappa followed ten years after Johns' example. However, while Johns depicted colourful American States with undefined borders and stamp-like names to elevate the banal to the status of fine art, Boetti borrowed world maps in order to portray conceptually the evolution of the political scene during the Cold War.

In 1969, Boetti took a printed world map 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, including 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).

This superlative example from Boetti's famed corpus was designed in 1983 in the artist's studio in the Trastevere in Rome and subsequently sent to Kabul, Afghanistan to be embroidered. Fascinated with the culture and indigenous craft of Afganistan, this location had been off limits to the artist following the Soviet infiltration and indignieous insurgence during 1979.  The embroidered text that features in the Mappe produced during 1983 poignantly allude to the artist's challenge and protest against the military occupation that prohibited him from returning to his beloved Kabul. In the present Mappa the embroidered phrase "mettere al mondo il mondo a Kabul Afganistan" is legible along the top edge.  Translated as give birth to the world in Kabul Afganistan Boetti simultaneously draws attention to his own powers of artistic invention in creating a new version of the world, whilst also alluding to the relatively transitory nature of the political world against the seemingly unchangeable structure of our planet. Herein lies the visual dichotomy within Mappa: the tectonic changes in Nature are conflated with the comparatively transient politically imposed boundaries of Mankind.  As Jean Christopher Amman articulates, "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).

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 the Arte Povera movement that first brought the artist to prominence in the 1960s, whilst exhibiting an astutely aware and pioneering artistic fascination with cultural 'otherness'.  Within the remarkable Mappe Boetti channels his conceptual empathy with art, 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).