Fernando Botero
Fernando Botero (born April 19, 1932) is not a newcomer to the Colombian (and global) art scene. He drew attention to himself already at the end of the fifties, more precisely in 1958, when he received the first prize at the Salón de Artistas Colombianos exhibition. He spends most of his time creating in Paris, and in the last three decades he has achieved international recognition with his paintings, drawings and sculptural works.
After his first attempts in the 1960s, Fernando Botero devoted himself to sculpture only in the 1970s. He also remains a painter who prefers to create still lifes and landscapes, and whose style is often compared to the style that characterized Picasso‘s art during the artist’s stay in Brittany. However, today the most recognizable is Botero‘s sculptural work, which connoisseurs say is essentially abstract, despite its insistence on figuration. The move should not be determined by external stimuli, but rather arbitrarily chosen and an expression of the artist’s intuition.
The oeuvre of one of Latin America’s best-known artists is of course primarily defined by the silhouettes of plump human (and animal) figures. Latin American folk art is reflected in his use of flat, vivid colors and bold shapes – while Fernando Botero also clearly leans on the old masters he imitated in his youth: portraits of the bourgeoisie and political and religious dignitaries in terms of composition and contemplative posture, they are distant relatives of royal portraits from the brushes of Goya or Velázquez. The oversized proportions of Botero‘s figures in these cases probably also hint at the excessive self-confidence and inflated ego of his subjects. At the same time, it could be argued that Botero‘s work is in many ways reminiscent of the magical realism of one of his most famous compatriots, Gabriel García Márquez: both of them, with incredible imagination, create a world from scratch that is completely earthly and incredible in the same breath.