Alighiero Boetti and Salvo, two of the most original figures on the Italian artistic scene in the second half of the 20th century, began their activity in the late 1960s in Turin, a city characterized by strong intellectual ferment at the time. They shared a studio in Corso Principe Oddone 88 there from 1969 to 1971. This exhibition tells the story of a friendship and an artistic tug-of-war fuelled by countless experimentations - photographs, words, embroidery, paintings and drawings - but also by journeys and other adventures. In that short but intense season, the two artists pondered, albeit with different meanings, the representation of the Self.

Boetti was oriented towards a precise formulation of his own identity as an artist as it related to time, a dimension that constantly fascinated him. For Salvo, the years between the 1960s and the 1970s corresponded to a moment of ironic self-historicization, involving the assumption of his own Self as an underlying theme of his work. The second part of the exhibition focuses on the later developments in the artists’ research, which, by then, they carryied out independently of each another.

In the distance gradually created between them in 1972, when Boetti moved to Rome, a shared interest in certain specific themes,such as identity and the elsewhere, persisted. However, the conception of the two-dimensional surface, for Boetti, and painting, for Salvo, was what definitively separated them. From the mid-1970s, Salvo devoted himself to painting in a totalizing manner, while Boetti was more oriented towards the conceptual practice of proliferation and proxy, in other words, assigning the creation of his works to assistants.

Boetti and Salvo continue to be figures of reference for the new generations of Post-Conceptual artists in the 21st century.