Fernando Botero saw the light in a humble family. But he soon lost his father when he was four years old, so his mother raised him and his two brothers with the help of her brother. He became interested in drawing early and studied it first in Medellin and then in the Colombian capital, Bogota. His uncle entered him into a bullfighting school, but he left in shock and has since become extremely afraid of bulls. This experience was silent in his first drawings.
A woman places a red rose in front of a picture of Fernando Botero AFP – FREDY BUILES
Travel and discovery experiences
Fernando Botero held his first exhibition when he was twenty years old in Bogotá. In the Colombian capital, he became close to artistic and literary circles and was influenced by the writings of the Chilean thinker Pablo Neruda and the Spanish poet and writer Federico Garcia Lorca. He moved between European cities: first Barcelona, then Madrid, where he studied at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts – San Ferdinand. His first visit to Paris was brief because the charm of the Italian city of Tuscany attracted him, so he settled there to study mural techniques and methods of sculpture and painting at the Academy of San Marco, especially since he was a lover of the Italian Renaissance. Then he opened a player in it.
Call of the Americas
Fernando Botero’s actual start was in New York, where he organized his first solo exhibition in the United States when he was twenty-five years old. This experience came after his return from Mexico, where he spent a period of time with his first wife, Gloria Zea. We find in the Museum of Contemporary Art in New York a painting by Fernando Botero, which is considered one of his most famous paintings and is titled “Mona Lisa at the Age of Twelve.”
Botero’s characters are funny and crying
Fernando Botero is known for his unique style that tends to exaggerate his characters, which are intentionally exaggerated on the canvas. Most of his paintings revolve around the concept of family. Characters are often inconsistent, as if the artist wanted, by playing with measurements, exaggeration, and exaggeration, to show the absurdity of life, full of strangeness and eccentricity. Botero’s large, fat figures are the results of experiences and trends he encountered in the many countries and cities he visited.
A family portrait of Fernando Botero at the Botero Museum in Bogotá AFP – JUAN BARRETO
“It saddens me to leave this world.”
Fernando Botero was always thinking about death, as he said in an interview on the occasion of his eightieth birthday: “It makes me sad to leave this world and stop drawing because I enjoy my work so much.”. His enjoyment of his work was the reason for his prolific production. Thanks to his passion, perseverance, and many important meetings, he was able to reach the international level. Among the coincidences of meetings, one brought him together with Dietrich Malov, director of the German Museum in New York, for which he organized several successful exhibitions, and another coincidence brought him together with Tania Gres, the owner of a gallery in Washington. It was very important material and moral support for him.
A series of paintings by Fernando Botero about torture and sexual abuse in Iraq AFP – PASCAL PAVANI
Iraq is bleeding in Fernando Botero’s paintings
Fernando Botero always said that he did not think about what he wanted to paint, but rather let the ideas flow spontaneously onto his paintings. He was inspired by beauty, but also by the ugliness of wars and human tragedies. In his paintings, he embodied the conflicts of his native Colombia, and in 2006 he also paid attention to the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. He created a series of drawings and paintings that express the torture practices carried out by the American army in this prison. His exaggerated figures take on a philosophical dimension in the paintings of Abu Ghraib prison. Characters who catch the irony of life imprisoned in absurdity devoid of all meaning. Perhaps the incident that affected Fernando Botero the most and embodies this random absurdity was the explosion of the bomb that was placed under a statue of him in his hometown bearing the title “The Bird.” The bomb killed twenty-eight people. Fernando Botero was greatly affected by this incident and sculpted a symbolic statue called “The Bird and the Peace,” which the municipality of Medellin placed in the place of the first statue.
Statue of Fernando Botero AFP – JOAQUIN SARMIENTO
More Colombian than Colombians
Fernando Botero kept drawing until the end, his daughter says and adds “More Colombian than Colombians themselves. He always carried Colombia in his heart, not only because he followed the news of his country and responded to every need in every area in which he could provide assistance, but also because Colombia nourished his artistic works thanks to his memories there.“. Botero’s body visits his hometown in a final tribute to him on Thursday, September 21, 2023, before he is buried in the city of Pietrasanta, north of the Italian city of Tuscany. He is buried next to his wife, the Greek sculptor Sophia Vari, who died four months before Botero’s departure after forty-eight years of life together.
