2023-09-15 17:34:17
Time.news – It is Colombian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero has died. I had 91 years old. This was announced by the president of Colombia, Gustavo Petro, with a post on X, celebrating “the painter of our traditions and our defects, the painter of our virtues”. The Colombian president did not specify the place of death. Botero was born in Medellin, in the center of the country, on 19 April 1932 and is considered among the greatest artists of the twentieth century.
Botero was the artist of voluminous figures, “not fat”, as he used to clarify. Born on April 19, 1932 in Medellín, Fernando Botero Angulo has traveled through contemporary and modern art, but it was precisely his figurative style, developed through the soft shapes of his plump figures, that gave him worldwide fame.
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Botero’s career began as an illustrator in Nedellin’s El Colombiano newspaper, one of Colombia’s most important regional media outlets. Those first steps allowed him, at the age of 19, in 1951, to realize his first dream and to hold a solo exhibition at the Leo Matiz Gallery in Bogotá.
From an early age he was interested in painting and also in bullfighting, as one of his uncles enrolled him in a school for bullfighters. That world is very present in his work. His early artistic influences were the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros and Antonio González Orozco, as well as colonial baroque altarpieces.
© Paul PALAU / ONLY WORLD / Only France via AFP
In 1952 Botero received second prize at the National Artists’ Salon, which allowed him to travel to Europe. He thus managed to develop his artistic life in Florence, where he studied at the Accademia di San Marco, or in the quiet town of Pietrasanta, where he lived his last years and where he kept his laboratory open.
The painter and sculptor also studied at the Royal Academy of Art of San Fernando, Madrid, and began exhibiting in the 1960s in the United States, with a first exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Center, where he began to display his distinctive figurative style. He also lived in Paris, where he spent much of his time at the Louvre Museumand in Mexico City, where he painted a volumetric mandolin with which he opened the doors of the style that characterizes his work.
His works are scattered in dozens of cities around the world, but the milestone that marked its universality came in 2015 and 2016 when he held his first complete and retrospective exhibition in places like the National Museum of China in Beijingin Tiananmen Square, and the China Art Museum in Shanghai.
© David DUCOIN / ONLY WORLD / Only France via AFP
Botero has donated most of his works to his native country and its pieces are distributed among the Botero Museumin the Colombian capital; Plaza Botero (Medellín), Santo Domingo Square (Cartagena) or in the Narino Palace, the presidential palacewhich houses the sculpture “The Dove of Peace” and the monumental painting “The Nun”.
Il Botero MuseumThat houses the most complete collection of his work, was created in 1998 with the donation he made to the Banca della Repubblica of 123 works by him and 87 by international artists. Botero obtained numerous international awards, among which the the Guggenheim International prize nel 1957which earned him an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and made him an international name.
His awards also include the Order of Andrés Bello (1976), the Silver Cross of the Order Boyacá (1977), the French Legion of Honor (2002), the Prix Américas (2002), the Grand Cross of Order of Isabel la Católica (2007) and the title of Honorary Ambassador of Colombia to UNESCO.
In 1969 he held his first major exhibition at the Claude Bernard Gallery in Paris and in 1972 at the Marlborough Gallery in New York. The following year he moved to Paris, where he created his first sculptures, which he exhibited for the first time at the Art Fair in the French capital.
© Ghislaine BRAS / ONLY WORLD / Only France via AFP
In April 2022, his native Medellín celebrated his 90th birthday in style as a gesture of gratitude for having illuminated with his works a city plunged into darkness due to drug trafficking violence. The His works have been the protagonists of million-dollar auctionsas in 2022, when the sculpture “Man on Horseback” sold for $4.3 million at Christie’s.
Botero was married three times. His first wife was Gloria Zea, between 1955 and 1960, and together they had three children. In 1964 he married Cecilia Zambrano, with whom he had his fourth child, Pedrito (1970-1974) and divorced in 1975. Since 1978 he had been married to the painter and jewelery designer of Greek origin Sofía Vari, who died in May this year.
In 1974 an event that changed his life and his work: his third son, four-year-old Pedrito, died in a car accident in Madrid in which the artist almost lost a hand. The pain – both physical and psychological – was so profound that this fateful moment marked a complex phase in his work, which lasted about a year, in which he dedicated himself solely and exclusively to painting his son.
The last exhibition before his death, entitled “Sensuality and melancholy”, was inaugurated on Thursday in Murcia (Spain), to show his artistic evolution through works from various periods ranging from the 70s to his most recent creations.
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