Fernando Botero

FERNANDO BOTERO (Medellín, Colombia, 1932- Monaco, 2023).
"La corrida", 1992.
Ink on the cover of the book "La corrida", José Manuel Caballero Bonald, 1989.
Drawing and dedication by the painter.
Book published by Lerner and Lerner.
Framed in methacrylate box.
Measurements: 33 x 66 x 7 cm.
Bullfighting has always been one of the preferred themes in Botero's painting, who dedicated himself to it more systematically between 1984 and 1989, a period that can also be considered a culminating moment due to the unity of style and themes in which the artist worked. In this book written between the poet José Manuel Caballero and Botero, a drawing by the artist representing a bull wounded by banderillas can be seen on the inside cover.
Fernando Botero is a painter, sculptor and draftsman, as well as the best known contemporary Colombian artist, author of a totally personal figurative language, marked by the exalted volumetry. In 1944 he attended the bullfighting school of La Macarena in Medellin, but a mishap caused him to abandon this career. Once his family understood his vocation for painting, he began his career. He made his debut when he was only sixteen years old, and since then he has shown his work all over the world. He financed his studies by making illustrations for a newspaper (El Colombiano), but was expelled from the Colegio Bolivraiana for the drawings that accompanied an article he made about Picasso, considered obscene, and had to finish his studies at the Liceo de la Universidad de Antioquia, where he went to Bogota in 1951, where he met some prominent intellectuals and began to exhibit his work. He received a Second Prize at the IX National Artists Salon, money with which, along with the sale of some works, he went to Europe. He arrived in Barcelona and then went to Madrid, where he enrolled in the San Fernando Academy of Art, and lived off his drawings. He spends the summer of 1953 in Paris, and then goes to Florence, where he enrolls in the Academy of San Marcos, learning first-hand about the Italian Renaissance. He went to Bogota in 1955, and after receiving harsh criticism for an exhibition, he married and went to Mexico City in 1956, returning to Bogota in 1958. He was appointed professor at the School of Fine Arts of the National University of Colombia. Two years later he went to New York, where he settled, and his language continued to grow and vary.He is currently represented in the Museum that bears his name in Bogota, as well as in the Metropolitan, the MoMA and the Guggenheim in New York, the Art Collection of the Luis Angel Arango Library in Colombia, the Museum of Modern Art in Vienna, the Kunsthalle and the Staatsgalerie in Munich, the National Museum of Fine Arts in Santiago de Chile, the Museums of Modern Art in Bogota, Tokushima, Hiroshima and the Vatican, the Pushkin Museum in Moscow, the Hermitage in St. Petersburg and the Scheringa de Spanbroek in Holland, among many other public and private collections around the world. It also has numerous public monuments in cities such as Madrid, Tokyo, Singapore, Paris and New York, among others.