Botero’s round, slightly surrealist works are exhibited in museums and public spaces around the world.
Colombia’s most famous artist, Fernando Botero, known for his voluptuous depictions of people and animals, has died, President Gustavo Petro announced. He was 91 years old.
“Fernando Botero, the painter of our traditions and our faults, the painter of our virtues, is dead,” declared the Colombian president. job on social media Friday, without providing details on the cause of death.
His daughter, Lina Botero, told Colombian radio Caracol that her father died Friday morning in Monaco from pneumonia.
Botero’s round, slightly surrealist works became extremely popular during his lifetime, exhibited in museums and public spaces in cities around the world, including Bogota, Madrid, Paris, Singapore and Venice.
Considered South America’s answer to Picasso and unanimously remembered Friday in Colombian media as “the greatest Colombian artist of all time,” Botero also addressed violence and political topics, including Colombia’s internal conflicts, as well as the representation of daily life.
Born in Medellin in 1932, his signature style was known as “Boterismo” and he is considered one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.
Although widely known for his large subjects, Botero insisted that his pieces were not focused on body type. “I don’t paint fat women,” he told the Spanish newspaper El Mundo in 2014. “No one believes me, but it’s true.
“I am interested in volume, in the sensuality of form. If I paint a woman, a man, a dog or a horse, I do it with volume.
Although he lived most of his life in Europe and the United States, his work was populated by chubby bullfighters, sex workers and other characters reminiscent of his native Medellin.
“I have painted Colombia all my life,” he once said. “The caring aspects I experienced in childhood and adolescence.”
In an interview with the AFP news agency on his 80th birthday in 2012, Botero said he often thinks about death. “It makes me sad to leave this world and not be able to work anymore because I take a lot of joy in my work,” he said at the time.
Botero’s work has sometimes focused on the long history of Colombia. internal conflict – he painted the aftermath of a car bomb and a group of partygoers being threatened by men wielding automatic weapons and bloody machetes.
He also created ironic portraits of public figures, including the founder of the rebel group the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC). Manuel Marulanda.
Botero also paid homage to classical paintings with witty reworkings – his version of the Mona Lisa is particularly bloated compared to Leonardo da Vinci’s original.
But it was his series of paintings on the Abu Ghraib prison scandal which sparked discussions in the art world and captured worldwide attention.
The paintings, based on testimonies and photos of victims taken on the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers, are graphic and heartbreaking.
The series has been exposed worldwide, attracting tens of thousands of viewers. The New York Times said the paintings, while not masterpieces, “restore the prisoners’ dignity and humanity without diminishing their agony.”
The final decades of Botero, one of the world’s richest artists, were a far cry from his humble beginnings. Fernando Botero Angulo, son of a traveling salesman and a seamstress, was born on April 19, 1932 in Medellin.
As an artist, Botero sought to make his work accessible, donating more than 200 works to create the Botero Museum in Bogota, which is free and receives half a million visitors a year.
More than 100 of these pieces belonged to him, while others came from masters such as Picasso, Dali and Monet. He donated 150 other works to a museum in Medellin and 23 of his sculptures are installed outdoors in Plaza Botero.
Botero is survived by his wife Sophia Vari, his daughter and his two sons. Another son, aged four, was killed in a car accident in 1974.