Fernando Botero, whose art is defined by generosity and sensuality, never paints from the model, but creates his motifs from the depths of memory and reflection. The joie de vivre expressed in his pictures and sculptures is unified with technical perfection and gifts the viewer joy and inspiration.
(...) Continue readingFernando Botero should have been a bullfighter
Fernando Botero was born on 19 April 1932 in Medellin, Columbia’s second largest city. He lost his father at an early age and grew up in modest circumstances but began painting already at the age of twelve. He should actually have become a torero, with his uncle obtaining him a place at a torero school. However, the young Fernando preferred to draw the bulls rather than kill them. He soon started earning a living as a designer and illustrator for the renowned journal ‘El Colombiano’, and was included in a group exhibition for the first time in 1948. In search of inspiration, he moved first to Bogotá in 1951 and then further on to Europe, financed by the reward from an art prize he won in Bogotá. In Italy, his attention was focused on the great Renaissance artists whom he diligently studied, copying, amongst others, the famous frescoes of Giotto di Bondone and Andrea del Castagno in Florence. His return to Bogotá, however, brought Botero bitter disappointment: an exhibition of his Italian pictures was not well received.
A mandolin in Mexico; breakthrough in Germany
In 1956, Fernando Botero married Gloria Zea and moved with his wife to Mexico to study the murals of Diego Rivera and José Clemente Orozco and it was there that he had the key experience that would eventually bring him world fame: whilst painting a mandolin, he noticed that the small hole in the centre of the instrument appeared larger than it actually was. Fernando Botero did not let go of this observation, and he began working intensively with proportions. The search, attempts and development lasted around a decade and took him in 1960 to New York where he was awarded the respected Guggenheim National Prize for his homeland of Columbia, and thus found his identity as an artist. Following separation from his wife, he was invited by two German curators, Klaus Gallwitz and Dietrich Mahlow, to visit their country, where he finally achieved international breakthrough with several exhibitions.
A plump Mona Lisa, a son Pedro, and bullfighters
Although Fernando Botero fills all his images - which since his stay in Paris in 1973 includes sculptures as well as paintings – with larger-than-life volumes, the artist insists that he has never painted a fat woman. It isn’t mass or surplus weight which create his rotund bodies, but full, overflowing joie de vivre. Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa became a stout, happy matron, whilst he captured his son Pedro from his second marriage at all stages of his life – even after the tragic death of the four-year-old in a car accident. In the 1980s he returned for two years to bullfighting, painting scenes of the corrida which can be admired today in the Marlborough Gallery in New York. Works by Fernando Botero have long commanded prices unimaginable for hardly any other Latin American artist.
On 15 September 2023, Botero died in Monaco at the age of 91.
Fernando Botero - Works that have already been sold at Kunsthaus Lempertz:
