Colombia’s most celebrated artist, Fernando Botero, identified for his iconic depictions of plump figures and animals, has handed away at 91 on Friday, the nation’s President Gustavo Petro introduced.
Botero’s works of plump and barely surreal kinds – usually with a contact of satire or political commentary – are enormously fashionable and have been displayed in cities all over the world, together with Bogota, Madrid, Paris, Singapore and Venice.
“Fernando Botero, the painter of our traditions and defects, the painter of our virtues, has died,” the president posted on social media.
Tributes poured in for the painter, and his hometown, Medellin, declared every week of mourning, with Mayor Daniel Quintero saying his works on show in that metropolis “will stay endlessly.”
Antioquia farmers depart flowers at bronze statues in Botero Sq., named in honor of Fernando Botero, Medellin, Colombia, Sept. 15, 2023. (AA Photograph)
The artist’s daughter, Lina, mentioned he died in Monaco, the place he had been residing, after creating pneumonia in current days.
“He continued portray till the top,” regardless of a battle with Parkinsons’ illness which made it laborious to stroll and talk, she added.
Botero – who had been dubbed the “Picasso of Latin America” – was a passionate and tireless artist, with an oeuvre of over 3,000 work and 300 sculptures.
Even in his later years, he mentioned he was working 10 hours a day. “I work extra now maybe as a result of I do know that there’s so little time left,” he mentioned in an interview with Agence France-Presse (AFP) in 2012, the 12 months of his eightieth birthday.
“I usually take into consideration dying and it saddens me to go away this world and never have the ability to paint extra. I find it irresistible a lot.”
Mayor Quintero mentioned Botero can be buried in Pietrasanta, Italy, alongside his spouse, the Greek artist Sophia Vari, who died earlier this 12 months.
Antioquia farmers depart flowers at bronze statues in Botero Sq., named in honor of Fernando Botero, Medellin, Colombia, Sept. 15, 2023. (AA Photograph)
World travels
Botero was drawn to artwork at a younger age and by 15 was promoting his work of bulls and matadors on the La Macarena bullfighting ring in Colombia’s second-largest metropolis, Medellin, the place he was born on April 19, 1932, the son of a modest touring salesperson.
After a primary solo exhibition in Bogota within the Nineteen Fifties, Botero left for Europe, touring to Spain, France, and Italy, the place he found classical artwork.
He moved on to Mexico, turning into influenced by its muralists, after which to New York in 1960, arriving with “$200 in my pocket”, he mentioned in a 2012 interview.
It was there that he met a German artwork curator who organized triumphant exhibitions in Germany within the Nineteen Seventies, launching his identify.
“I went from being a whole unknown with out even a New York gallery to being contacted by the most important retailers on the earth,” he mentioned.
Quantity, not ‘fats’
The trademark outsized dimensions of his work emerged in 1957 in his portray “Nonetheless Life with Mandolin.” He found “a brand new dimension that was extra voluminous, extra monumental, extra extravagant, extra excessive.”
An admirer of Italian Renaissance artwork, he doesn’t settle for the interpretation that his topics are fats.
“If I paint a lady, a person, a canine, or a horse, I all the time do with this concept of the amount. It isn’t that I’ve an obsession with fats girls,” he mentioned in an interview with the day by day Spanish newspaper El Mundo in 2014.
Sculpture grew to become a significant element of his work, developed at a famend Italian heart of sculpture, Pietrasanta.
He lived in that Tuscan city in addition to Monaco, New York, and different cities, with common holidays in Colombia.
The works of Fernando Botero, identified for his iconic large-sized figures and promoting for as much as 2 million {dollars} at auctions, have been exhibited in quite a few museums worldwide, Bogota, Colombia, Sept. 15, 2023. (AA Photograph)
Botero mentioned he was impressed by magnificence but in addition the troubles of his native nation, gripped by armed battle for over 50 years.
In 1995 a strong bomb positioned at his sculpture “The Hen” in Medellin killed round 30 folks and wounded scores. Botero 2000 donated a duplicate to face beside the exploded sculpture known as “Hen of Peace.”
A few of his work portrays scenes of Colombian guerrilla fighters, earthquakes, and brothels.
In a departure, he produced within the 2000s a sequence depicting abuse and torture on the U.S.-run Abu Ghraib jail in Iraq, saying afterward he was pushed by shock and anger.
Colombian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero poses in the course of the opening of his exhibition “The Circus” on the Museum of Antioquia in Medellin, Colombia, Feb. 2, 2015. (Reuters Photograph)
Beneficiant donator
Probably the most-sold artists of his lifetime, Botero additionally gave away a lot of his manufacturing, together with about 200 work and sculptures to Medellin and lots of others to the Botero Museum in Bogota.
In 2007 he donated the 25 work and 22 drawings of his Abu Ghraib sequence to the College of California, Berkeley, whereas a lot of his sculptures have featured in open-air exhibitions all over the world, even travelling to China in 2015.
Specialists have estimated the full worth of his inventive donations at greater than $200 million.
Married 3 times, Botero had 4 kids, one in all whom died in an accident aged 4.