Ben Brown Fine Arts is pleased to announce their participation at Frieze Masters this October. Renowned for its expertise in 20th Century Italian Art, the gallery will present an extraordinary display of works on paper by acclaimed Italian artist Alighiero Boetti (1940-94).

The focal point will be a monumental twelve-panel biro drawing from 1973, which spells out the title Mettere al Mondo il Mondo a Roma nella Primavera dell'Anno Millenovecentosettantotto Pensando a Tutto Tondo – reinforcing Boetti’s fondness for language and wordplay. Boetti’s biro works are amongst his most innovative series; this particular example is the largest biro work realised by the artist and was central to Game Plan, the 2011-12 retrospective exhibition at the Reina Sofía, Madrid, Tate Modern, London, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York.

Boetti’s unique approach to the self-portrait is exemplified in Autoritratto (Self-Portrait) (1969), where he reimagines the intimate experience of the self-portrait using the artificial fixedness of a Xerox machine. Each of the twelve panels features an image of the artist ‘signing’ a different letter in the deaf-dumb language to spell Autoritratto. Exhibited at the Tate Modern and MoMA, this work is key to understanding Boetti’s fascination with identity and communication.

The exhibition will also feature a rare selection of early works from an important Italian collection. Cimento dell’Armonia e dell’Invenzione (1969) and Dodice Forme dal 10 Giugno 1967 (1971) are prime examples of the conceptual and versatile nature of Boetti’s oeuvre.

Alighiero Boetti produced a great variety of artworks which deal with the polarities and dualities that complicate human experience: life and death, order and disorder, rationalism and irrationalism. The display at Frieze Masters will include vibrant biro works, drawings, collage, frottage and calendario which serve as Boetti’s vessels for exploring these recurrent themes.

Following his major retrospective at the Reina Sofía, Tate Modern, and MoMA in 2011, this presentation will highlight the significance of Boetti’s works on paper and demonstrate the cross-generational influence he continues to hold.

About the artist

Alighiero Boetti (b. 1940, Turin; d. 1994, Rome) was one of the most innovative and influential Italian artists of the 20th Century. His affiliation with the Arte Povera movement in the late 1960s was brief, and by the 1970s he stood apart from the collective movements of those times. He began working with a much broader spectrum of materials, from ballpoint pens to collage, sculpture, embroidery and even the postal system, producing works which were at once conceptually rigorous and visually striking. Based in Rome from 1972, Boetti travelled extensively and took

He has been honoured posthumously with a number of large-scale exhibitions, at the Galleria Nazionale d'Arte Moderna, Rome (1996); the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Vienna (1997); the Museum für Moderne Kunst in Frankfurt am Main (1998); Whitechapel Gallery, London (1999); Kunstmuseum Liechtenstein, Vaduz; and most recently, a major touring retrospective at the Reina Sofía, Madrid, Tate Modern, London, and the Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York (2011-12).