Male-Female

Between 1972 and 1973 Alighiero Boetti created a series of frottages for the Il Segnapassi gallery in Pesaro, in which he put a pair of scissors under a sheet of paper and traced their contours with pencil. The artist’s intervention makes each piece different as an ironic allusion to a serial yet manual work. In this case, the diptych of the scissors, first closed and then with the blades open, explores the object’s spatial presence. The title gives the work a further allegorical meaning, as it evokes the male-female duality according to the blades position. At the same time Arturo Schwarz worked on The Large Glass to discuss the theme of the union between masculine and feminine. Marcel Duchamp also dealt with this topic through his various alter egos. T he apparently binary and polar approach of Boetti’s work should probably be reinterpreted through the theme of the androgyne, – a recurring symbolic figure in alchemical treatises.