Published on the occasion of Mettere al mondo il mondo (4 October–23 December 2022): an exhibition curated by Mark Godfrey, featuring the works of 12 international artists at Thomas Dane Gallery, Naples. 

"In 1971, Alighiero Boetti began to use the phrase ‘Mettere al mondo il mondo’. One translation is ‘giving birth to the world’, but another more prosaic translation is ‘putting the world back into the world’ which implies a way of making art that Boetti followed. Instead of inventing images, constructing forms, or having things fabricated, Boetti took the stuff of the world, rearranged it, and put it back into the world as art. He used stamps, maps, the names and lengths of rivers, the colours of biro pens.  Boetti’s idea of putting the world back into the world is one approach among the many that artists take when transforming used objects, and this exhibition explores the different reasons they do this." - Mark Godfrey

Artists include Terry Adkins, Abbas Akhavan, Aligheiro Boetti, Abraham Cruzvillegas, Tacita Dean, Jimmie Durham, Jean-Luc Moulène, Betye Saar, Ser Serpas, Arthur Simms, Michael E. Smith and Cecila Vicuña.

Mark Godfrey is an independent curator and art historian based in London. Recent projects include exhibitions by Laura Owens and Jacqueline Humphries, and recent publications include essays on Faith Ringgold, Kevin Beasley, Petrit Halilaj, and Firelei Baez. From 2007 to 2021 he was Senior Curator at Tate Modern where he curated and co-curated several exhibitions including Soul of a Nation: Art in the Age of Black Power, Alibis: Sigmar Polke 1941-2011, and Franz West. He has published two books with Yale University Press: Abstraction and the Holocaust (2007) and Alighiero E Boetti (2013).  

Bilingual Italian/English