Born in Turin in 1940, the Italian artist Alighiero Boetti did not receive a formal education in the arts. He was in business school at the University of Turin, when he dropped out to pursue art, moving to Paris at the age of 20 to study engraving. Boetti began creating works out of industrial materials such as masonite, plaster, and plexiglass; these pieces were shown in exhibitions on Arte Povera, an Italian art movement that challenged the exclusivity of high art by utilizing everyday materials. Boetti was also deeply interested in systems of classification: time, geography, mathematics. His best-known works—large-scale embroidered maps of the world—are on view here in Rome, along with Zoo, a vast, systematically arranged collection of small plastic animals, originally created as a game for Boetti’s children.
—Paulina Prosnitz