Alighiero Boetti: Alighiero Boetti

Alighiero Boetti Exhibition to Open at Dia Beacon
Beacon, New York, June 24, 2026—Dia Art Foundation today announced further details of Alighiero Boetti at Dia Beacon. This exhibition of work by Alighiero Boetti features a selection from Dia’s permanent collection alongside key loans to illuminate the defining tenets of the Conceptual artist’s expansive oeuvre. Alighiero Boetti opens on June 26, 2026, and will be on long-term view.

“Alighiero Boetti’s work occupies a singular place in postwar art, bringing together conceptual rigor, formal invention, and a deep curiosity about the systems that organize our world. In the context of Dia Beacon, we see fascinating intergenerational resonances with these themes unfolding in works by artists such as Renée Green, On Kawara, and Sol LeWitt on view nearby. Tracing language, geography, and politics, Boetti’s ability to reveal new ways of thinking about authorship and identity underscores an enduring relevance,” said Jessica Morgan, Dia’s Nathalie de Gunzburg Director.

At Dia Beacon, works spanning four decades chart the artist’s career from his formative experiments with industrially fabricated paintings in the 1960s, through embroideries and mail art toward the end of his life in 1994. Debuting in Turin in 1967, Boetti’s early works draw on the structures and materiality of the rapidly expanding industry of mid-century Italy. For example, monochrome paintings labeled with their trademarked color name and an iron-gridded glass pane propped against the gallery wall both deploy nearly unaltered, commercially available materials.

At the turn of the 1970s, Boetti began to reinscribe the hand of the artist in the production of his work, a shift that was accompanied by a broadening of his horizon from Italian society to international geopolitics. He traveled to Kabul and collaborated with locals to create tapestries that explore linguistic and numerical systems as well as the mapping of borders, national narratives, and their internal dissonances. Balancing the processual, the linguistic, and the political with a defining interest in dichotomies and duplication, Boetti’s work contends with the materials and systems that structure subjectivities and worldviews.

“Boetti’s work asks, What is the role of the artist during periods of heightened societal change and geopolitical violence?” said Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, curator and co–department head. “His intuitive approach to Conceptualism, uniquely attuned to the meanings inherent to industrial and artisanal modes of making as well as to mass media and information systems, prefigures contemporary practices that annotate our conflicted times.”

Alighiero Boetti is curated by Matilde Guidelli-Guidi, curator and co–department head, with Liv Cuniberti, curatorial assistant.

Alighiero Boetti is made possible by significant support by Larry Marx. Generous support by Mila and Tom Tuttle, and additional support by Nelson Leong.

All exhibitions at Dia are made possible by the Economou Exhibition Fund.

About Alighiero Boetti

Alighiero Boetti was born in Turin in 1940. Spanning sculpture, painting, embroidery, drawing, and mail art, his work engaged in linguistic and numerical systems, mappings of geography, and notions of dichotomy and duplication to examine how structures of knowledge shape worldviews. Boetti’s work was debuted at Galleria Christian Stein, Turin, in 1967, and in the following two years, he participated in group exhibitions alongside fellow Arte Povera artists as well as in international shows that paired the Italian artists with their American Postminimalist peers. In 1972, he relocated to Rome, a move that accompanied his shift to working beyond a local Italian context and toward an international Conceptual practice centered on a growing interest in systems, language, dualities, and geopolitics. Frequent travels to Kabul throughout the 1970s informed the development of his embroideries. His major retrospective, Alighiero Boetti: Game Plan, was presented at the Museo Nacional Centro de Arte Reina Sofía, Madrid (2011–12), and later traveled to Tate Modern, London, and the Museum of Modern Art, New York (both 2012). Recent solo presentations include Alighiero e Boetti: Regola e Regolarsi, Ben Brown Fine Arts, London (2023); Alighiero Boetti: Insecure Unconcerned, Sprüth Magers, New York (2024); and Alighiero Boetti, SMAC Venice (San Marco Art Centre) (2026). Dia first presented Boetti’s work in 1994 in a two-person exhibition with Frédéric Bruly Bouabré. Boetti died in Rome in 1994.

About Dia Art Foundation

Taking its name from the Greek word meaning “through,” Dia was established in 1974 with the mission to serve as a conduit for artists to realize ambitious new projects, unmediated by overt interpretation and uncurbed by the limitations of more traditional museums and galleries. Dia’s programming fosters contemplative and sustained consideration of a single artist’s body of work, and its collection is distinguished by the deep and longstanding relationships that the nonprofit has cultivated with artists whose work came to prominence particularly in the 1960s and ’70s.

In addition to Dia Beacon, Dia Bridgehampton, and Dia Chelsea, Dia maintains and operates a constellation of commissions, long-term installations, and site-specific projects, notably focused on Land art, nationally and internationally. These include:

Walter De Maria’s The New York Earth Room (1977) and The Broken Kilometer (1979), Max Neuhaus’s Times Square (1977), and Joseph Beuys’s 7000 Eichen (7000 Oaks, inaugurated in 1982 and ongoing), all in New York
De Maria’s The Lightning Field (1977), in western New Mexico
Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty (1970), in the Great Salt Lake, Utah
Nancy Holt’s Sun Tunnels (1973–76), in the Great Basin Desert, Utah
De Maria’s The Vertical Earth Kilometer (1977), in Kassel, Germany
Cameron Rowland’s Depreciation (2018)
Media contacts

(U.S. press inquiries)
Hannah Gompertz
Dia Art Foundation
hgompertz@diaart.org
212 293 5598

Melissa Parsoff
Parsoff Communications
mparsoff@parsoff-communications.com
516 445 5899

(International press inquiries)
Sam Talbot
sam@sam-talbot.com
+44 (0) 772 5184 630