In 1968 Alighiero Boetti created a haunting yet playful image titled Gemelli. The dreamlike work features two likenesses of the artist, then 28 years old, shaggy of hair and slim of silhouette, as rebelliously sexy as a Rolling Stone. The two pictures were taken minutes apart and, decades before Photoshop, assembled in a photomontage to create the effect of Boetti walking hand in hand with himself. Around the same time, the artist began to experiment with ambidextrous writing; a few years later, he sandwiched the letter e — Italian for “and” — between his given name and his surname, essentially splitting his identity in two.

The doubling spills over into the rest of his oeuvre. As Mariolina Bassetti, international director of postwar and contemporary art at Christie’s Rome, says, “There are two kinds of art by Boetti.” On the one hand, there are the Arte Povera-associated artist’s highly conceptual works, which deal with temporality and the absurdity of life; see, for example, Niente da vedere nulla da nascondere, 1969, a plain grid of glass panes that, as the title goes, has “nothing to show, nothing to hide.” On the other hand, he also made unabashedly bright embroidered pieces as well as subdued yet elegant Biro, or ballpoint pen, drawings on paper, such as Aerei, 1983, which fetched €63,150 ($85,000) at Sotheby’s Milan last November. The latter two bodies of work are particularly sought after; with simple imagery rendered in everyday materials, they are pleasing and instantly familiar. “Boetti is a very interesting artist,” says Claudia Dwek, cochair of Sotheby’s Europe and senior specialist in contemporary art. “He is both conceptual and fun.”

Boetti’s market mirrors the dichotomy between his popular pieces and his more poetic ones. The past two years have seen a spike in the artist’s values, with nine out of the top ten auction sales of his work set in this period. However, most of these sales have been embroidered “Mappa” works, which the artist commissioned from Afghani women artisans and cast as a global dialogue intended to, in his words, “erase the distance between Rome and Kabul.” The watershed moment was June 2010, when a 1989 “Mappa” tapestry with a rare dark-blue background sold for £1,833,250 ($2.8 million), well above the estimate of £900,000 to £1.2 million ($1.3–1.8 million), at Christie’s London.

Although the “Mappa” pieces are today Boetti’s signature works, they weren’t always critical or commercial winners. Back in the 1970s, “reactions were terrible,” says Mark Godfrey, a curator at Tate Modern and the author of a recent monograph on Boetti from Yale University Press. Over time, however, the maps have come to be seen as prescient. According to New York art adviser Allan Schwartzman, “Boetti's work set the foundation for an interest in globalism in contemporary art.”

Boetti made many trips to Afghanistan in the 1970s, hiring Afgham refugees to produce the maps, as well as the “Tutto” series — embroidered collages in eye-popping hues — and works that resemble stylized kilims and quilts. These outsourced pieces have fared better in the market than those by the artist's own hand. Not long after the record Christie's sale, Bonhams thought it was making a safe bet when it chose a Boetti to headline its rebooted contemporary sale in London last October. The house hyped Anno, 1984 (est. £1.2–1.8 million; $1.9–2.8 million), made up of 192 pencil drawings of magazine covers that document the year of its creation, but the work failed to find a taker.