Fernando Botero

David Benrimon Fine Art is pleased to present Fernando Botero: Maestro for our spring exhibition. The show features a selection of paintings, sculpture, and works on paper by the internationally renowned artist, in honor of the Maestro’s life. Widely celebrated as Colombia’s most successful and well known artist, Botero’s oeuvre of satirical and graceful voluminous subjects spans over seventy years. The exhibition focuses on works from Botero’s career that infuse historical and contemporary art references through his iconic “Boterismo” style. With exaggerated proportions and voluptuous figures, flat and bright color, and modest sensuality, Botero reimagines historical themes, mythological subjects, and contemporary Latin American life. He playfully renders the reclining nudes, religious icons, as well as still lifes, families, and society people. Botero’s figures are both inviting and enchanting, and the overwhelming ‘roundness’ of his characters, whether sculpted in bronze, painted on canvas, or drawn on paper, have solidified him as a legend in the art historical canon.

“Art should be an oasis, a place of refuge from the hardness of life.”

—Fernando Botero

Botero often informs his work through the aesthetics of Italian masters, with Lady in Profile as a masterful example of Botero’s inspiration from the Renaissance period. During this era, women were painted seated in a profile view, looking away from the viewer. This pose was very passive, and usually lacked emotion from the subject; however Botero’s depiction is beautiful, feminine, and relatable, even in its unconventional, stout portrayal. L’atelier (The Workshop) depicts Botero himself standing at an easel, with his gaze to the viewer. In the background, there is a variety of works by the artist including family portraits, still lifes, and society people. These pieces display a small sampling of the themes that Botero has focused on throughout his career. Self-portraiture became popularized in the Early Renaissance, a time period that Botero gleaned much of his artistic inspiration from. This piece is unique as Botero did not commonly paint himself, and typically focused on other subjects.

Born in Medellín in 1932, Botero attended school for matadors for several years, but recognized that his true passion was art. In 1952, Botero left Colombia for Spain and France before settling down in Florence, where he became acquainted with important Renaissance paintings and discovered techniques from a bygone era. Botero has exhibited extensively, including retrospectives at the Hirshhorn Museum, Washington DC, in 1980 and the Beaux-Arts Mons in Belgium in 2021. His work resides in major museums, including The Museum of Modern Art, New York, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Museo Botero in Bogotá which is dedicated to the artist. Between 1990 and 2000, Botero donated more than 300 works, both his own and those by 19th- and 20th-century European Masters, to the Museum of Antioquia in Medellín, as well as to the Banco de la República in Bogotá. In September of 2023, the artist passed away at age 91.

Curated by David Benrimon