Focus Series: Alighiero e Boetti: Alternating 1 to 100 and vice versa

Italian artist Alighiero e Boetti, associated with Arte Povera and conceptual art, consistently challenged the fetish of individuality through various explorations of multiplicity in process-based art. For Alternating 1 to 100 and vice versa (1992–1993), the artist invited fifty teams of students or friends from France and Italy to create designs based on a specified mathematical operation of dividing squares, alluded to in the title. All fifty of these designs were adapted into kilims by Afghani refugee weavers in Peshawar, Pakistan, and ten were selected by Boetti to be mounted on canvas. The exhibition included twenty-eight kilims and corresponding patterns, and the ten canvases. The completed installation was the last in a series of artworks using similar procedural themes, finalized only a year before the artist’s death in 1994.

Focus Series: Alighiero e Boetti: Alternating 1 to 100 and vice versa was part of the museum’s Focus Series (1992–1998), which was dedicated to presentations of distinct bodies of work by artists working in all media and featured a roster of distinguished local and international artists.

Focus Series: Alighiero e Boetti: Alternating 1 to 100 and vice versa was organized and produced by the Magasin, Centre National d'Art Contemporain de Grenoble in France.