| Fernando Botero, the Colombian painter born in Medellin on April 19, 1932, is known throughout the world as one of the great artists of the second half of the twentieth century. He held his first public exhibition of paintings at the age of 16 and moved to Bogota when he was 19. In 1952, he travelled to Madrid where he enrolled in the Academia de San Fernando and intensively studies the paintings in the Prado Museum. A year later, he travelled to Italy and devoted himself to studying Renaissance art in Florence. In 1955, Botero returned to Bogota where he spent five years before moving to New York where he lived until 1973. He then settled in Paris and began working in sculpture. In 1983, he established his home and studio in Piertrasanta, a village in Tuscany, Italy.
At the present time, Botero lives and works in Paris, New York and Pietrasanta.
Botero is one of the world' s most commercially successful living artists, with strong markets in Europe, the U.S., South America and the Far East. Better known as a painter, he has been sculpting since the 1960s when he lived in New York. In 1975 in Paris, he began casting his sculptures with their distinctive shapes, in bronze. Today, the sculptures are made primarily in Pietrasanta in Tuscany, Italy, home of some of the most famous foundries in the world. He shuttles between New York, Paris, Pietrasanta, and Bogota.
Botero's colossal pieces fashioned from smaller models were not taken particularly seriously in the contemporary art world until their series of installations along the avenues of the world's principal cities. Brooks Adams of Art in America speculated that "Botero should be understood as a latter-day Baroque showman who succeeded in conquering the metropolis with his down-to-earth parade of mythical charged creatures: a raucous bird, a phallic cat, humans ranging from lovable village types of stylized, over-muscled athletes and fecund-looking female nudes. |
