Alighiero Boetti: games, twins and maps – in pictures

Born in 1940, Boetti was hailed by Germano Celant, the Genoese art critic who identified and organised the movement, as one of arte povera's quintessential artists. Boetti's earlier works, such as Ping Pong (1966, pictured) often used materials he found in hardware stores around industrial Turin
Photograph: Alighiero Boetti Estate by DACS; SIAE, 2012, courtesy Fondazione Alighiero e Boetti

Ping Pong consists of two large wall-mounted cases in which the words 'ping' and 'pong' emerge as electric current alternates between the two. Part of his 1967 debut, they show a preoccupation with time, games and mystery, as well as duality and opposition, which would remain central to all his subsequent work
Photograph: Alighiero Boetti Estate by DACS; SIAE, 2012, courtesy Fondazione Alighiero e Boetti

Following Duchamp's example, Boetti created a deliberate public persona – in his case, twins. In the early 70s, he changed his name to Alighiero e Boetti (Alighiero and Boetti). And Twins (1968, pictured) was a set of postcards he mailed to friends, showing him rather surreally holding hands with himself
Photograph: Alighiero Boetti Estate by DACS; SIAE, 2012, courtesy Fondazione Alighiero e Boetti

Column, 1968. Boetti worked with rolls of cardboard and stacks of building supplies, and tried to write on fast-drying cement panels before the cement set. And yet he would go on to renounce arte povera almost as soon as the movement gained traction
Photograph: Alighiero Boetti Estate by DACS; SIAE, 2012, courtesy Fondazione Alighiero e Boetti

Io che Prendo il Sole a Toriino, il 19 Gennaio 1969 (Me Sunbathing in Turin, 19 January 1969). This self-image is made of more than a hundred lumps of concrete, with a yellow butterfly in its midst, showing the creator as a Duchamp-inspired dandy despite the inert deadness of the figure
Photograph: Alighiero Boetti Estate by DACS; SIAE, 2012, courtesy Fondazione Alighiero e Boetti

La Mole Antonelliana, 1970-1975. Boetti used the postal system as a means of creative expression. He sent images of this Turin landmark to friends from his travels in the US, Ethiopia, Guatemala, Morocco and more, refusing to objectify other countries while showing how Italy marketed itself
Photograph: Alighiero Boetti Estate by DACS; SIAE, 2012, courtesy Fondazione Alighiero e Boetti

Boetti visited Kabul in 1971, and later that year opened a hotel there. Some of his best-loved works are the maps he commissioned from Afghan embroiderers, based on world maps created by a London cartographer. Boetti let the women complete the maps however they liked, and many wrote personal messages in Persian around the borders. One reads: 'The Afghan women with patience are creating the world's picture'
Photograph: Alighiero Boetti Estate by DACS; SIAE, 2012, courtesy Fondazione Alighiero e Boetti

For Guatemala (1974), Boetti posed with local Guatemalans against painted screens of various exotic locales, challenging the viewer's assumptions about who is local and who a visitor
Photograph: Alighiero Boetti Estate by DACS; SIAE, 2012, courtesy Fondazione Alighiero e Boetti

Austrian Airlines made a series of jigsaw puzzles based on Boetti's Aeroplanes series (Aerei, 1989, pictured) to divert travellers on long trips
Photograph: Courtesy of Carmignac Gestion Foundation/Aligherio Boetti, DACS 2011

Alternando da uno a Cento e Viceversa (Alternating from One to a Hundred and Vice Versa), 1993. Boetti was obsessed by calculations, alphabet games and numerology. He was also superstitious, consulting psychics and the I-Ching, and dabbled with zen and Sufi poetry
Photograph: Alighiero Boetti Estate by DACS; SIAE, 2012, courtesy Fondazione Alighiero e Boetti

Each of Boetti's successive Mappa (Maps), such as this one from 1994, reflected geopolitical change, most notably in Africa and the former countries of the Soviet Union and Yugoslavia. After the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan some of the maps were made by exiled Afghans living in Iran or Peshawar, Pakistan
Photograph: Alighiero Boetti Estate by DACS; SIAE, 2012, courtesy Fondazione Alighiero e Boetti