Alighiero Boetti was an Italian artist so intrigued by the duality of life that as a young man he inserted the conjunction "and" between his first and last names. In 1968 he became "Alighiero e Boetti," highlighting an obsession with his alter ego and an unorthodox worldview.

To celebrate the occasion, Boetti mailed postcards printed from a photomontage depicting two images of himself to 50 friends, a work that he titled "Gemelli" ("Twins").
"It would be nice to be two people – one all aware and real, the other all dreamy and unconscious – who go hand in hand, without ever mingling," the artist said of his decision to split his identity.

Boetti's interest in multiplicity infuses an exhibition at The Arts Club of Chicago, which offers a sampling of works from his varied career that began in the mid-1960s (he died in 1994 at the age of 54). Curated by director Kathy Cottong, the exhibition consists of only 10 works. But they are substantial pieces that illustrate how Boetti applied his perpetual curiosity to a breathtaking range of subjects, including mathematics, systems of communication and semantics.

If that sounds conceptual, for the most part it is. The conceptual in Boetti's hands, however, can be humorous, strikingly beautiful and sweet.

MADE A GAME OF IT

Boetti approached art like a game. He drew out the enchanting, even mystical possibilities to be found in such workaday institutions and tools as the postal system, maps, grids and lists.

One work, "Untitled – Victoria Boogie Woogie," consists of 42 framed collages of envelopes, each bearing seven colorful Italian stamps, that the artist mailed to his home from various Italian cities.There are 5,040 envelopes in all, the total number of permutations to be derived from a sequence of seven different items. The resulting rhythmic color and elegance recalls the work to which its title refers, Mondrian's "Victory Boogie Woogie."

"Alighiero was introspective, curious, almost prophet-like," said David Leiber of the Sperone Westwater Gallery in New York, whose partner, Gian Enzo Sperone, was the first dealer to represent Boetti in the 1960s. "He was definitely a spiritual person but at the same time interested in everyday phenomena."

The exhibition includes one of his first works, an edition of the print "Manifesto 1967." It presents a list of the names of 16 artists, including himself, followed by varying combinations of eight symbols. The work contains no explanation of the symbols, and viewers are free to speculate what they represent.

TRAVELS TO AFGHANISTAN

Beginning in 1971 Boetti frequently traveled to Afghanistan, at the time a virtually unknown land that was the antithesis of his native country. Boetti employed groups of Afghani weavers, mostly women, to complete maps, rugs and inscriptions of his design, a practice similar to Sol LeWitt's method of creating his wall drawings.
One of the exhibition's earlier works consists of a pair of square tapestries painstakingly embroidered with flowers and two dates, the first being Boetti's 100th birthday (Dec. 16, 2040) and the second an optimistic prediction of his death (July 11, 2023).

Other embroidered works include a series of world maps that he produced from 1970 through the late 1980s, of which the exhibition has one from 1989. Roughly 4 feet by 7 feet, the tapestry fills in the areas of continents with national flags, a representation that emphasizes the arbitrary definition and ultimate fragility of global politics. Farsi inscriptions and letters from the Roman alphabet line the border.

Boetti viewed the maps as a fulfillment of his artistic goals. "To my mind, the work of the embroidered maps represents supreme beauty," he said. "For these works, I made nothing, selected nothing, in the sense that the world is 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 chosen."

-Lisa Stein