Raising existential questions centered around the theme of ordine e disordine (order and disorder), Boetti’s modern parables and metaphors playfully delve into the complexities and contradictions of the human condition.

Insecure Unconcerned, a solo exhibition of works by Boetti at the New York gallery on the occasion of the thirtieth anniversary of the artist’s death, comprises artworks from four decades and provides an overview of Boetti’s seminal oeuvre.

Anchoring the show is a portfolio of eighty-one numbered sheets, Insicuro Noncurante, a compendium of Boetti’s artistic production between 1966 and 1975. The manifold works on paper outline the fundamental concepts underpinning his extraordinary artistic universe: order and chaos, coincidence and necessity, seeking and finding, similarity and difference, and singularity and multiplicity.

The 81 sheets of Insicuro Noncurante are installed over the walls of the New York gallery, alongside other iconic works of Boetti such as Tutto (1988), Mappa (1989), “Biro” drawings (1975–78) and an Aerei (1989).

Mappa reflects on the systems and classifications we apply to the natural world. The artist provided the idea and created the designs, while the artisans chose the magnificent colors and produced the tapestries. On their surfaces too, sign systems, languages, and ideas converge, conveying a cultural dialogue between East and West.

The show at the New York gallery is dedicated to the late Pasquale Leccese, a close friend of Boetti’s and curator of the artist’s previous presentations with the gallery: Early Works, Sprüth Magers, London (2003) and Works 1966-88, Sprüth Magers, Munich (2002). Before he died last year, Leccese was planning to curate Insecure Unconcerned in celebration of Boetti.

Installed among archival documents are polychromatic word embroideries known as “Arazzi.” Individual letters are set against differently colored square grounds, which are organized into a grid to form phrases and proverbs.

Logic and order determine the size of each identical square, the positioning of the letter within, as well as the work’s sentence, while disorder is introduced through the colors and the experience of reading the work. A synthesis of writing and image, Boetti’s word pictures reveal order and its antonym to be far from antithetical—rather, they are interdependent.

Interested in the impossibility of formalizing the world itself, Boetti’s work aims to describe and grasp the present. His conceptual repertoire is based on the temporal and processual dimensions of art and continues to have great influence on contemporary thought.