Fernando Botero, a 91-year-old Colombian artist renowned for his sculptures and paintings of corpulent figures, has passed away. His works depict oversized humans and animals. Botero also dealt with politics and other significant topics.
President Gustavo Petro referred to him as “the painter of our traditions and shortcomings, the painter of our virtues.” His daughter Lina announced on Friday that the Monaco-based artist was suffering from pneumonia.
Local media praised Botero as Colombia’s finest artist ever. Medelln, his birthplace, has proclaimed a week of mourning.
The son of a traveling merchant, Botero was born in 1932. Before relocating to the United States in 1960, he encountered classical art while traveling in Europe in his twenties.
In the late 1950s, he encountered “a new dimension that was more expansive, monumental, extravagant, and extreme,” he said.
He occasionally exaggerated the scale of his subjects for comedic effect or parody. His rendition of Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa with an exaggerated visage is one of his most renowned works.
Botero stated that he was incapable of depicting delicate organisms. As his subject, he could choose a slender needle, but on canvas or in bronze, he would transform it into a 10 times larger object with distended sides.
Once, his daughter requested him to illustrate an animal for homework. In a 2008 BBC interview, he declared,
“Okay, I’ll do it.” “Then I began to be very cautious, tried to be very careful, while performing the horse, and all of a sudden it became Boteresque. And she responded, “No, no, Papa, no, no, Papa, you are ruining everything!”
“As you can see, my brain is already completely malformed; I cannot do it.” Everything that I do is Boteresque.
The enlarged scale of his subjects was frequently mocked by critics. Botero told the Spanish publication El Mundo in 2014,
“When I paint a woman, a man, a dog, or a horse, I always keep in mind the volume.”
“I don’t paint fat women,” he elaborated. “What I do paint are volumes.”
Some of his more somber works depict Colombian rebels and earthquakes. There were some disagreements. In 1993, Pablo Escobar, the notorious leader of a drug cartel, was assassinated by police in Medelln. His depiction of Escobar’s demise drew criticism.
Botero initially depicted Escobar evading bullets in a heroic display of defiance but eventually yielded to pressure and produced a portrait of the deceased drug kingpin.
His large portraits depicting the US Army’s maltreatment of prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq also caused a commotion. They were displayed near the White House of President George W. Bush in Washington.
Botero maintained laboratories in New York, Paris, Mexico, Colombia, and Italy. Sotheby’s auction house reports that any of his works fetch over $2 million.
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