WALDENBUCH.- Museum Ritter presents Alighiero Boetti: Order and Disorder, an exhibition dedicated to one of the most influential artists of the postwar era. Boetti managed to grasp the complexity of the world we live in, to the point of overcoming the barriers of a cultural universe that today seems closed off by insurmountable obstacles - Afghanistan, where Boetti lived and commissioned many of his works. The show will be open until April 19, 2009.

Order and disorder, system and chaos – Alighiero Boetti (1940-94) not only thought in these categories, his entire artistic output revolved round these two poles. Like scarcely another artist he questioned apparent opposites and showed that it is all a question of how one regards them. Time and again he gave new artistic expression to this dualistic world view and in this way created his own cosmos in which opposites effortlessly interact.

In particular Boetti’s embroidered pictures draw their singular beauty from the synthesis of order and disorder. It was through his arazzi, as he called them, that the artist rose to international fame. In these works he fashioned words and texts into squares that form brightly coloured embroidered pictures. Only on second sight do the individual letters stand out from the splendour of their colours to reveal themselves as readable texts. A large number of small arazzi are on show at the exhibition, including Boetti’s masterpiece made up of 199 pieces, Order and Disorder (1985/96).

Alighiero Boetti’s penchant for idiosyncratic orderings and new arrangements did not even stop at his own work: in his wide-ranging folio work Insicuro noncurante [= uncertain – carefree] he looks back on his artistic cosmos from the years 1966-1975. The 81 leafs contained in the portfolio form the second major focus of this exhibition. They include formal geometrical studies and sketches for variations on the artist’s major works, along with photographs, photomontages, collages, and reprints of earlier graphics. Every single sheet is an artwork in its own right, while together they grant a unique insight into the artistic universe and life of an extremely diverse and fantastically obsessive artist.

Alighiero Boetti was born in Turin, Italy in 1940. Although not formally trained in art, Boetti was preoccupied with the theory of creativity from an early age. Traveling to Afghanistan at the beginning of the 1970s, he was introduced to the traditional craft of embroidery, which marked a turning point in the artist's career. His fundamental concern with the relationship between "order" and "disorder" is manifest in his grid structures, derived from the "magical squares", that feature sayings and aphorisms that stem from cultural, philosophical, mathematical and linguistic contexts.

Having shown in Milan and Turin, Boetti had his first US solo exhibition in New York at John Weber Gallery in 1973. He continued to show throughout Italy and the United States until his premature death in 1994.

He has been honored post-humously with several large-scale exhibitions, most notably at the Museum Moderne Kunst in Vienna in 1997 and the Museum Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main in 1998.