Fernando BOTERO, Artist and sculptor
Fernando Botero was born on April 19, 1932 in Medellin, Colombia.
Despite living in a city of considerable size, Botero’s childhood was devoid of trips to museums and other cultural events.
Fernando Botero’s artistic talents were evident while he was still quite young; he wrote and illustrated an article about Pablo
Picasso, which was published in the Colombian newspaper El Colombiano when he was just seventeen years old. Botero moved to Bogota
in 1951 and that city was the site of his first one-man exhibition, held at the Leo Matiz Gallery.
In 1952, at age 20, he was awarded a Second Prize at the National Salon in Bogota. Using money from this win and from sales of his paintings,
Botero traveled to Spain, France, and Italy to further his education as an artist by studying the old masters such as Giotto, Piero della Francesca,
Paolo Uccello, and Andrea del Castagno.
In 1956 at Mexico, Botero painted “Still Life with Mandolin,” which marked the first appearance of his distinctive rounded style. In 1958,
back in Colombia, he won First Prize at the National Salon in Bogota for “Bridal Chamber: Homage to Mantegna.” He moved to New York City in 1960
and in 1961 the Museum of Modern Art of New York acquired his “Mona Lisa, Age Twelve.” When he left New York City for Paris in 1973,
Botero continued to paint but added sculpture to his repertoire.
While his work included still life and landscapes, Fernando Botero favors situational portraiture. Drawing on his experiences as a youth in Colombia,
Botero portrays people from all walks of life in all types of situations. His signature large, corpulent figures can be viewed as political commentary
or satire. Botero himself notes that as an artist, he is attracted to certain forms without exactly knowing why.
Fernando Botero is a Colombian painter and sculptor who is noted for the rotund, slightly comic figures that began to appear in his works during the 1960s.
His paintings of this period show the influences of French painter Paul Gauguin and of early work by Spanish artist Pablo Picasso.
In 1948, he started work as an illustrator. In 1950, he went to Europe, where he attended the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, copied Velázquez and Goya in
the Prado and admired the frescoes in Florence He went to Paris in 1953, studying the old masters in the Louvre Museum.
He went on a long visit to Mexico in 1956-57 and the experience of Muralism significantly influenced his future direction Botero first visited
the United States in 1957, buying a studio in New York City in 1960. A number of the works he executed from 1959 to 1961 show the influence of the New York
abstract expressionism movement in their visible brushwork.
After this long period of development, the painting style he is best known for emerged around 1964. It is characterized by inflated, rounded forms,
painted with smooth, almost invisible brushstrokes, puffing up to an exaggerated size human figures, natural features, and objects of all kinds,
celebrating the life within them while mocking their role in the world. He combined the regional with the universal, constantly referring to his native
Colombia and also creating elaborate parodies of works of art from the past - whether Dürer, Bonnard, Velazquez or David.
Not without humour, the symbols of power and authority everywhere - presidents, soldiers and churchmen - are targeted in his attacks on a society
still infantile in its behaviour.
In 2005, Fernando Botero’s anger and disgust with the politically charged Abu Ghraib prison circumstances was revealed in a series of 50 paintings.
The paintings were first displayed at the Palazzo Venezia in Rome and then in Germany and Greece.
In 2006, they could be found at the Marlborough Gallery in New York City. In 2007, they showed at the Center for Latin American Studies at the
University of California at Berkeley. Fernando Botero has said that he will not sell the paintings but will donate them instead; so that the horrific
incidents will never be forgotten.
Fernando Botero divides his time between New York City, Paris, and Tuscany.
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