Fernando Botero

Fernando Botero 1932-, Colombian figurative painter and sculptor, b. Medellín, one of the most celebrated contemporary Latin American artists. He attended his native city's university (grad. 1950) and art academies in San Ferdinando, Spain (1952-53), and Florence, Italy (1953-55). Botero lived in Mexico (1956-57) and New York City (1960-73) before moving (1973) to Paris, where he usually resides. In an age that idolizes slenderness, Botero has made an art of corpulence. Strongly influenced by the colorful folk art of his homeland and by such painters as Velázquez , Goya , and Diego Rivera , he attempts to "create sensuousness through form" in his canvases of rounded, massively rotund figures painted in bright decorative hues and in his sculptures (notably monumental bronzes) of similarly voluminous people and animals. Often cheerfully whimsical and sometimes satirical in approach, his work typically includes individual and family portraits, nudes, equestrian figures, bullfighting scenes, and still lifes. Beginning in the late 1990s, as drug-fueled guerrilla warfare raged in Colombia, his work became much darker (though unchanged in style) as he created paintings and drawings of the period's kidnappings, massacres, torture, and death. He has continued exploring these themes in paintings that depict the abuse of detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.

Bibliography: See biography by M. Hanstein (2003); E. J. Sullivan, Botero Sculpture (1986); W. Spies, Fernando Botero: Paintings and Drawings (1992); A. and J. C. Lambert, Botero Sculptures (1998); A. M. Escallon, Botero: New Works on Canvas (2000); P. Gribaudo, Botero Women (2003).

Botero, Fernando (b Medellín, 19 Apr. 1932). Colombian painter and sculptor. His early paintings were influenced by various styles, including Abstract Expressionism, but in the late 1950s he evolved a highly distinctive manner in which figures look like grossly inflated dolls; some of his paintings are sardonic comments on modern life, others are parodies of the Old Masters. Since the early 1970s he has lived mainly in New York and he has acquired an international reputation accompanied by huge prices for his work in the saleroom. He has made sculpture in a similar vein to his paintings, including several public monuments in bronze, notably Broadgate Venus (1990, Exchange Square, London).