Worldwide recognized painter and sculptor, we believe that every single person who listens the name of Fernando Botero, automatically recreates in his mind the plump shapes of the characters who dwell the big work of the Colombian artist.
Since he was a child the only thing he wanted to do was painting, good choice! So far, when he is nearly 81, he has been doing the same all the time, seducing us with his work based on an incredible sense of exaggeration.
Fernando Botero and his cultural inheritance (Spanish)
The family is the center of life for this artist born in Antioquia. This, plus his affection for the countryside, bulls and horses, determines his work riddled with bullfighting and religious scenes. At the same time, he has been capable of capturing, with astonishing perfection, the costumbrist scenes of his teens and early youth that shared with his brothers, fatherless, in an artistic and literary ambience with liquor flavour in 50’s Medellin.
Botero´s family (Spanish)
Trained in Europe and influenced by figurative and classical painting, he travelled to the United States where he came up against the triumph of the abstract. He hardly kept himself in the newyorker cultural panorama even he had to do a big effort to expose in a gallery, but at the end his “Mona Lisa a los 12 años” or his “Familia Presidencial” gave him the final recognition. The gossip and tattles illustrator, the most universal Colombian who sticked to his own reality, has managed to paint his history in a humouristic way and shared it with the rest of the world.
In 1972 Botero wanted to give his work a third dimension and he turned into a sculptor, the armony of his paintings and his obsession for the perfection in the finishing of his works has given us superb rounded sculptures now settled all around the planet.
Fernando Botero is the most original, controversial and valued Colombian painter of all times. If you ever go to Bogota, you shouldn´t miss the Museo Botero in La Candelaria district, the historic and cultural downtown of the Colombian capital.
Mona Lisa at the age of 12
Fernando Botero discusses his Abu Ghraib series, which depicts prisoner abuse by American guards at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq