Ben Brown Fine Arts London is delighted to announce Alighiero e Boetti: Embellishing the Sky, taking place from 19 March to 4 June 2025. Organised by curator Elena Geuna in collaboration with architect and cartoonist Guido Fuga and supported by the Archivio Alighiero Boetti in Rome, this extraordinary show offers a rare opportunity to experience one of the most defining, visually striking, and conceptually rich series by Boetti: the Aerei. Comprising works seldom seen and united for the first time in London, the exhibition is an invitation to witness the radical vision of one of the 20th century’s most evocative and innovative conceptual artists.
Alighiero Boetti (1940–1994) remains a pivotal figure in contemporary art, his career charting a shift from Arte Povera’s material interrogations in the 1960s to a broader exploration of conceptual and collaborative practices. Renouncing the idea of a singular artistic identity, he adopted the name “Alighiero e Boetti” in the early 1970s, an intellectual manoeuvre that fractured the self into dualities of personal and public, individual and collective. His art, expansive in its scope and layered in its inquiry, is a labyrinthine exploration of global interconnectedness, systems of classification, and the inherent tension between structure and spontaneity.
The Aerei series, conceived during the 1970s, embodies these conceptual concerns with remarkable clarity. The works are characterised by a permutational and disorienting structure, where chaos and order collide within a system that is paradoxically rational and classified. Emerging from Boetti’s meticulous practice of collecting images of aircraft from magazines and newspapers, the series transforms the act of cataloguing into a philosophically incisive meditation on multiplicity and flux. Created during a period of rapid expansion in commercial air travel, the series also reflects the era’s electrifying sense of possibility and adventure, capturing the global enthusiasm for a world newly connected through the skies.
In 1977, Boetti collaborated with architect and cartoonist Guido Fuga to produce a triptych of aeroplanes suspended in flight against an expansive, infinite sky. Passenger jets, fighter planes, cargo aircraft, Concordes, and early propeller-driven models are depicted in mid-air, their forms frozen in a fleeting yet boundless choreography. The compositions, simultaneously static and dynamic, present a constellation of planes intersecting in the sky without hierarchy or clear spatial orientation, inviting the viewer to navigate the visual and conceptual disarray.
Executed through an intricate process involving photographic templates, watercolour washes, and biro ink, these works exemplify Boetti’s mastery of hybridisation, where disparate media converge into a single, cohesive whole. The vast expanse of sky becomes a canvas of infinite possibility, its serene tonalities punctuated by the stark white silhouettes of planes. Boetti’s choice to reproduce, enlarge, and transform the compositions over time – frequently engaging assistants in the production process – reaffirms his conception of art as a collaborative, open-ended dialogue, perpetually evolving and resisting closure.
Central to the exhibition is one of Boetti’s historic Aerei pencil drawing, dated 1977, which marks the inception of his collaboration with Fuga. This delicate and intimate work reveals Boetti’s conceptual brilliance as he maps a choreography of aircraft, their forms caught in a vortex-like spiral. The planes, each meticulously rendered, appear to emerge from the confines of the picture plane, enlarging and advancing towards the viewer with hypnotic momentum. This drawing, one of twelve preparatory studies for the celebrated series, offers an unparalleled glimpse into Boetti’s creative process, exposing the delicate interplay between order and chaos that defines his oeuvre.
