Almost everyone has seen his spherical figures; in many places around the world they are part of the cityscape: in Singapore it is a fat bird, in Jerusalem it is a fat man on a fat horse, in Bamberg and Vaduz there are fat women lying down. The popular, recognizable sculptures have made the Colombian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero one of the best-known brands in contemporary art and one of the most famous artists in Latin America in recent decades.
Botero’s sculptures are omnipresent, like this lady in New York’s Time Warner Center.
(Photo: Mark Lennihan/AP)
Botero was born in Medellin in 1932. At the age of twelve he was sent to a bullfighting school, and at the age of 16 he published his first drawings in the newspaper. During his years of teaching in Bogotá, Madrid, Florence and Paris, he gradually discovered his incomparable style, which was far removed from all current artistic trends. Echoes of Henri Rousseau were most easily seen in his technically brilliant, often strangely static paintings. But with his doll-like characters, who appeared both sensual and lifeless, whose voluminous bodies often almost completely filled the screen, he developed an even more special version of the naive.
After settling in Paris in the 1970s, his breakthrough came in the 1980s and 1990s: several large museums showed his enigmatic scenes of picnicking families and his portraits of serious girls, men in hats, even popes. Many of his paintings looked as if they were alienated versions of old masters, pictures of pictures, meta-art.
Most recently, Botero created several series of works on political subjects. His work on torture in the American military prison Abu Ghraib was best known.
(Photo: Pablo Martinez Monsivais/AP)
But above all, his booming production of pleasing large-scale sculptures for public spaces made Botero’s Michelin Man style more and more a scam. Botero seemed to recognize the danger and took a political direction late in his career: in 2004 he dealt with the violence in Colombia in 50 drawings and paintings. In 2005, he caused a stir with his series of almost two hundred works on the mistreatment of prisoners by US soldiers in Abu Ghraib prison. Fernando Botero died in Monaco on Friday at the age of 91.