“His characters are always oversized and curvy, like hyperbole. When we were kids, Botero was the one who painted fat people, but he hates when they call his characters fat or obese; he prefers to talk about volume. Botero said that the greatest joy in painting it is the sensuality of the forms”, says in a section of the exhibition the Colombian singer J Balvin.
It is that the musician also a native of Medellín joined the tributes with a video of about four minutes in which he reviews memories of his childhood while analyzing Botero’s painting “July 20”, approaching each of its details.
His corpulent figures have led him to tackle a wide variety of subjects, including reinterpretations of paintings by the old masters, Latin American street scenes, domestic life, and satirical portraits of political figures. The volume of his characters allows the artist to emphasize and highlight certain features, increasing their impact.
Botero’s artistic training was self-taught, despite the fact that he attended the San Fernando Academy in Madrid and the San Marcos Academy in Florence. The first known works of his are the illustrations that he published in the literary supplement of the newspaper El Colombiano, from his hometown.
At the age of 19, he traveled to Bogotá, where he presented his first individual exhibition of watercolours, gouaches, inks and oils at the Leo Matiz Gallery, and with the proceeds he lived for some time in Tolú. From his stay there would come the oil painting “Front the sea”, with which he won the second prize for painting at the IX Annual Exhibition of Colombian Artists.
His “eureka” moment came in 1956, when he was living in Mexico City: the artist painted a mandolin with an unusually small sound hole, causing the instrument to take on exaggerated proportions. Botero was excited by these seemingly new possibilities, and this ignited his lifelong exploration of volume.
In 1977 he exhibited his bronzes for the first time at the Grand Palais in Paris and in 1978, Fernando Botero painted his own pastiche of the painting, entitled “Monalisa” and painted in his characteristic “Boterismo” style, in homage to one of the most famous of all western oil paintings, created by Leonardo da Vinci.
The online exhibition also allows you to discover one of his most important works: “Guitar Lesson”, which is in the National Museum of Colombia.
While he is mostly known for his paintings, he is also an accomplished sculptor who creates amazing forms that seem like an extension of his two-dimensional works: his sculptural pieces can be found on the streets of Medellin, New York, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, Jerusalem. , among other places.
Source: Ambito
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