The Boetti ‘Aerei’ Arbitrage

Alighiero Boetti
According to the data from ARTDAI, Boetti’s auction sales first peaked in 2014 and 2015—right after a huge Boetti retrospective traveled from MoMA in New York to the Reina Sofia in Madrid and the Tate Modern in London in 2012. Photo: Carl Court/AFP/Getty Images
Marion Maneker
March 26, 2025

On the face of it, perhaps there’s nothing extraordinary about Ben Brown opening a new show of Alighiero Boetti’s Aerei—the templated images of various airplanes, often tinted with watercolors or hand-colored with ballpoint pen or both—at his underground London gallery. Yes, Boetti is one of the most important conceptual artists of the late 20th century, and his fame, influence, and market seem to have only grown in recent years. And, yes, the gallery attests that there has never been a show of the Aerei, which are all works on paper and therefore considered less valuable than oil paintings or his signature tapestry works. But the show plays a meaningful role in the market structure for Boetti, an artist with numerous discrete bodies of work within his broader practice.

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