After finishing 2nd in 1952 at the 9th National Salon of Artists in Bogota, Botero traveled to Madrid to study the works of old masters such as Tintoretto, Titian, Goya and Velazquez at the Prado Museum and toured Italy on his motorcycle to see fifteenth-century Renaissance frescoes. In 1955, Botero moved to Mexico City and firsthand became familiar with the craftsman of the Renaissance.
Botero decided that art was his true profession and at the age of 16 he held his first exhibition. As a young man he attended a matador school for several years but his true interest was art, drawing inspiration from the pre-colonial and Spanish colonial art that surrounded him as well as from the political work of the Mexican monumental painter Diego Rivera. Botero began his career as an artist and took up painting at the age of 22.
In the early 1950s, Botero traveled to Europe to study art at the Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando in Madrid, and then spent time in Paris absorbing the work of the Old Masters at the Louvre.
Fernando Botero was born in Medellin, Colombia, and now lives in Paris, New York and Pietrasanta (Italien). He creates paintings and sculptures of plump figures with round physicists and naive, childish facial expressions. Their exaggerated sizes and dimensions, as well as their playful appearance often give Boteros’ sculptures a humorous touch.
A figurative, abstract painter and sculptor, his style is known for representing people and animals in large size and is called boterism. One of Latin America’s most famous living painters, the Colombian artist Fernando Botero is known for creating bloated and oversized images of people, animals and elements.
Fernando Botero was born in 1932 in Colombia and left Matador School to become an artist – first exhibiting his work in 1948 – his later art which is now on display in major cities around the world focuses on situational portraiture combined by proportional exaggeration of the image. – One of the paintings, The Death of Pablo Escobar, shows a Colombian drug lord killed by the police.
You can read more here but we have to mention that Escobar himself was known for using the works of artists like Salvador Dali and Pablo Picasso to launder money. Botero was reportedly shocked when he learned that his work had been confiscated during a raid on Escobar’s house.
Explaining his reaction to the 2000 drug-induced violence in his country, Botero said that the Colombian drama is so disproportionate that today the violence, thousands of dead and displaced people, the procession of coffins cannot be ignored.
Botero was directly involved in organizing the exhibition. He was curated by his daughter Lina Botero who selected and distributed works, most of them from the artist’s private collection, to eight galleries to create a thematic overview of the artist’s 60-year career.
In 1994, Botero was the victim of a failed kidnapping and a terrorist group planted a bomb under his Pajaro (Bird) sculpture he donated to the city of Medellin in 1995. The enlarged version of the exhibition was held on June 10 at the Palais des Beaux-Arts in Mexico City, where it was attended by about 250,000 people.
He created his sculptures using acrylic resin and sawdust due to financial constraints that did not allow him to work with bronze ; a striking example of this period was the 1964 sculpture Little Head (Bishop), painted with great realism ; since then he has created countless versions of Leonardo da Vinci, Rubens, Velazquez, van Eyck… you name it. He began painting in 1948, and his illustrations were published in El Colombiano.
Although he only spends one month a year in Colombia, he considers himself as the most Colombian artist alive because of his isolation from international art. His work can be found at the most notable places in the world such as Park Avenue in New York and the Champs Elysees in Paris.
Hear Juan Carlos Botero talk about his father’s childhood and art and animation careers. Fernando Botero (born April 19, 1932 in Medellin, Colombia) is a Colombian artist known for his paintings and sculptures in inflatable forms of people and animals. He later moved to Paris and then to Florence Learn from the masters of the Italian Renaissance.
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