Fernando Botero

Fernando Botero was the best known Columbian contemporary artist and one of the most famous proponents of Latin American fine art. He had his first solo exhibition in Bogotá at the age of nineteen. The following year money from a prize allowed him to undertake a voyage to Europe, where he studied the Old Masters as well as the frescoes of Italian Renaissance. Botero‘s paintings are influenced by South American art, such as pre-Columbian works and modern artists like Diego Rivera as much as they are by European artists such as Peter Paul Rubens, Diego Velázquez or Albrecht Dürer. In 1956 he drew „Still Life with Mandolin“, the first work in which he changed the volume of the object. Botero‘s figures are life personified, not fat, but voluminous, not shapeless, but voluptuous, regal, sensuous and formidable. And even when he depicts them satirically, he does not offer them up to ridicule. As early as 1956 Botero was awarded the prestigious Guggenheim Prize. From the early 1970s, besides painting, the artist also created sculpture. A characteristic trait, also of his sculptural language, is the exaggerated voluptuousness of the figures and objects, heightened by a concomitant reduction of details. His monumental sculptures were presented in open air exhibitions at the Forte di Belvedere in Florence, on the Champs Elysées in Paris, in Monte Carlo, on Park Avenue in New York, in Chicago, in Madrid, along Canale Grande in Venice and in front of the Brandenburg Gate in Berlin, to name just a few.