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Young Botero also worked as a newspaper illustrator to support his artistic interests and before attending San Fernando Academy. In , using his gallery earnings, Botero sailed to Europe. He arrived in Barcelona and then moved on to Madrid. In , Botero moved to Paris, where he spent most of his time in the Louvre , studying the works there. He lived in Florence from to , studying the works of Renaissance masters.
He had more than 50 exhibitions in major cities worldwide, and his work commands selling prices in the millions of dollars.
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Around , Botero made his first attempts to create sculptures. A notable example during this time was Small Head Bishop in , a sculpture painted with great realism. The material was too porous, so he abandoned this method. The resulting explosion killed 23 people and injured more; the perpetrators were never identified. In , Botero exhibited a series of 27 drawings and 23 paintings dealing with the violence in Colombia from through He donated the works to the National Museum of Colombia , where they were first exhibited.
In , Botero gained considerable attention for his Abu Ghraib series, which was exhibited first in Europe. Beginning with an idea he had had on a plane journey, Botero produced more than 85 paintings and drawings in exploring this concept [ 38 ] and "painting out the poison". Botero said he would not sell any of the works, but would donate them to museums.
In , after having focused exclusively on the Abu Ghraib series for over 14 months, Botero returned to the themes of his early life such as the family and motherhood. In his Une Famille [ 42 ] Botero represented the Colombian family, a subject often painted in the s and s. In his Maternity , [ 43 ] Botero repeated a composition he had already painted in In , he exhibited the works of his The Circus collection, featuring 20 works in oil and watercolor.
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In a interview, Botero said that he was ready for other subjects: "After all this, I always return to the simplest things: still lifes. While his work includes still-lifes and landscapes , Botero concentrated on situational portraiture. His paintings and sculptures are united by their proportionally exaggerated, or "fat" figures, as he once referred to them.
Botero explained his use of these "large people", as they are often called by critics, in the following way:.
An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; only later do you attempt to rationalize or even justify it. It became his trademark. I was drawing a mandolin, and I made the sound hole very small, which made the mandolin look gigantic. I saw that making the details small made the form monumental.
So, in my figures, the eyes, the mouth are all small and the exterior form is huge. During — , Botero had exhibitions in both Washington D. Despite selling almost all of his paintings, he didn't gain favor of critics. Though he spent only one month a year in Colombia, he considered himself the "most Colombian artist living", due to his isolation from the international trends of the art world.
There, he began to do sculptures and became more famous with his work. By the s, his work had become a great success, and was known around the world. Later in the s, his work was now determined by political occurrences going on around him. In , he finished his "Abu Ghraib" series, which was about the American military forces abusing prisoners from the Abu Ghraib prison in the Iraq War.
Botero himself recalled: "It took me fifteen years to make a 'botero' from start to finish, but I was insisting on the same idea and the same universe [ In , the couple travelled to Washington D. Botero remained in New York for over a decade, at first living in Greenwich Village, moving to a studio on the Lower East Side in , before, after marrying his second wife, Cecilia Zambrano, in , relocating to a studio on Fifth Avenue.
While in New York, Botero painted one of his first critiques of the Colombian state. La familia presidencial The Presidential Family depicts the Colombian president with his wife, mother-in-law, and daughter, flanked by a military general and a bishop. The inflated proportions of his figures are rendered in flat, bright colors and strong outlines that owe a debt to the style of Latin-American folk art.
In Botero opened another studio, this time in Paris, as his attentions turned increasingly toward sculpture. It was the perfect medium through which to expand the style and themes of his painting. Botero and Cecilia had a son, Pedro, in but the next year the couple divorced. In , Botero was married for a third time to the Greek sculptor and painter Sophia Vari they remain married to this day.
However, tragedy struck in when Pedro was killed, and Botero badly injured, in a car accident while the family was on holiday in Spain. In , Botero set up a studio in Pietrasanta, Italy, for the exclusive production of his sculptures as the area is known for its marble quarries and foundries. He says, "I love living in Pietrasanta. This town has become a great family, a place where everybody knows me and where I can share an informal word and a glass of wine.
I enjoyed painting in the small chapel of the Misercordia. I gave two frescoes as a token of my love for this land [ I have several houses around the world, but sentimentally speaking, this is my favorite abode". Like them, he began to employ strong color schemes and he came to the realization that he had a responsibility to explore themes and subjects relating to Colombian and Latin American culture, heritage, and identity.
He had, of course, already produced several paintings on this theme notably his bullfight paintings but by he was turning his attention more concertedly toward Colombia's popular cultural identity with scenes of Colombian nightclubs and Latin American musicians and dancers. Arts writer Elena Martinique says that with works such as Dancing in Colombia , "one can imagine the intoxicating confluence of loud music and odors of sweat, tobacco, liquor, and cheap cologne that fill the space".
While some scholars and critics were apt to read the work as "social commentary", that alludes to illicit goings-on at nightclubs such as prostitution , art historian Kacper Grass reads the same image as revealing the "working-class origins" of Cumbia , a traditional Colombian style of dance and music that blends Indigenous, Black, and Spanish influences.
For his part, Botero stated only that "music, literature, and painting - all those oases of perfection that make up art - compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life". Moving from the late s into the s, Botero became increasing occupied with his sculpture, with celebrated outdoor exhibitions of his huge bronze animal and human figures. He produced several "Great Cat" sculptures which appeared in cities around the world including Barcelona, New York, and Yerevan.
The bombing, which occurred during a music festival, killed thirty people, and injured a further two hundred. The leftist guerrilla group FARC Revolutionary Armed Force of Colombia took responsibility for the bombing, claiming it was revenge against Botero's son, Fernando Botero Zea, who was at that time Colombia's defence minister and had refused to enter into political negotiations with the group.
Botero was deeply moved by the bombing and in , he donated an identical undamaged bronze bird which now sits next to the rebuilt bombed statute. The names of the bombing victims are engraved on its base. During the s Botero began to focus more on social and political issues, producing series of works that dealt explicitly with drug violence including kidnappings, massacres and car bombings in Colombia.
He said of his Colombia drug violence series, ''They are different from what I have done in the past, the kinder Colombia that I knew as a boy. This is a Colombia that is more violent, more real. This is the fact that we cannot ignore''.
He would soon turn his attentions towards another political issue, this time using his art to implicate the United States in human rights abuses. His so-called " Abu Ghraib " series highlighted the alleged torture of detainees at the Abu Ghraib prison, west of Baghdad. Botero was interviewed by the art critic Kenneth Baker about the series.
People would not remember the tragedy of Guernica today if it were not for that painting [Picasso's late-Cubist work Guernica ]".
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Botero described his series in fact as a two-and-a-half-year period of "parenthesis" that, as Baker described, "[recalled] the circumstances of Picasso's frenzied production of his great anti-war statement -- an interlude between portraits of his lover at the time, Dora Maar ". In Botero returned to more benign themes in his art, like his early favorite genre, the still life.
While on vacation in Mexico around this time, he visited a traveling circus that provided him with the inspiration for a new series. Indeed, the Boterismo style proved the perfect fit for the color and human drama of the circus with Botero producing more than oil paintings and drawings on this theme. In his final years, Botero lived and worked between Colombia, France, America, and Italy, enjoying his yacht and what he called his "favourite toy", a Rolls-Royce Phantom V.
Following the news of his death, Colombian President Gustavo Petro called him "The painter of our traditions and our defects, the painter of our virtues".
Childhood leukemia cure: Explore Fernando Botero's enchanted childhood in ss Medellín, from a bullfighting school to the Renaissance Europe. His artworks, a blend of myth and reality, unveil Colombia's past and present.
Botero's fame rests on his unique, and consistent "Boterismo" style, which is instantly recognizable and internationally acclaimed. As curator Christian Padilla puts it, "Fernando Botero became a brand - a distinctive personality which can easily be connected to Colombia". Often misunderstood as merely "fat", his figures in fact embody a sensual and humorous voluminosity that can serve also as social critique.
As the art critic Rudy Chiappini writes: "The dilation of [Botero's] subjects give them abstract, unreal, and grotesque dimensions that are studies in beauty and terror. Botero refered to himself as the "most Colombian artist living". He dared, despite serious threats to his personal safety, to reveal the good and the bad aspects Colombian history and culture in his art.
Content compiled and written by Alexandra Duncan. Edited and revised, with Summary and Accomplishments added by Antony Todd. The Art Story. Ways to support us. Movements and Styles: Political Artists. Important Art. Portrait of a Young Indian Still Life with Violin Woman with a Mirror The Arnolfini after Van Eyck Car Bomb Abu Ghraib 46 Circus People Education and Early Training.
Mature Period. Late Period and Death. Influences and Connections. The painter and sculptor died on September 15, , at age By the early s, Botero had begun studying painting in Madrid, where he made his living copying paintings that hung in the Prado and selling the copies to tourists.
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Throughout the s, Botero experimented with proportion and size, and he began developing his trademark style—round, bloated humans and animals—after he moved to New York City in The inflated proportions of his figures, including those in Presidential Family , suggest an element of political satire and are depicted using flat, bright color and prominently outlined forms—a nod to Latin-American folk art.
And while his paintings includes still lifes and landscapes, Botero typically concentrated on his emblematic situational portraiture. After reaching an international audience with his art, Botero moved to Paris in , where he began creating sculptures. These works extended the foundational themes of his painting, as he again focused on his bloated subjects.
As his sculpture developed, by the s, outdoor exhibitions of huge bronze figures were staged around the world to great success. In , Botero turned to the overtly political, exhibiting a series of drawings and paintings focusing on the violence in Colombia stemming from drug cartel activities. The series took him more than 14 months to complete and received considerable attention when it was first exhibited in Europe.
In , Botero unveiled the book Circus: Paintings and Works on Paper , which showcased paintings, 31 drawings, and 22 watercolors from through Botero was inspired by his trips to the circus as a young boy in Colombia.