Fernando Botero
Bio
Fernando Botero is a Colombian painter, drawer and sculptor, born in Medellin in 1932. Botero began drawing with scenes from the festa brava as an illustrator in 1944, at the age of 12, to later make his first watercolors. In the 1950s and 1960s, Botero's style was defined, but the brushstrokes in his painting and the lines in his drawings were still loose. Between 1966 and 1968 Botero finished defining his style, developing the volume of the forms and altering the proportions. Starting in 1973, Botero settled in Paris, venturing into sculpture, which he would come to dominate with great mastery and with exhibitions of monumental works on the main streets of many cities in the world. Currently, and after almost eight decades of work in the art world, Botero dedicates his days to the creation of small-format drawings and watercolors, where his mastery of the technique is manifested.
Statement
Fernando Botero is the most recognized Colombian artist in recent decades. His vast work, now fully consolidated, his deliberate aversion to contemporary art and his extensive knowledge of the history of classical painting makes Botero an exceptional artist in the country and the rest of Latin America. His paintings and drawings are very personal works that can in no way be confused with the various international figurative postures of recent years. He depends more on the art of the great masters, on popular art, on the pre-Columbian tradition, on the imagery of the colonial period of Latin America, than on any figurative "ism."
2.5 x 4m / 98.4 x 157 in
