Fernando Botero

FERNANDO BOTERO (Medellín, Colombia, 1932- Monaco, 2023).
"Smoking man", 1994.
Pen on paper.
Drawing made on the courtesy page of the book Stratis Andreadis, 1994.
Signed and dated in the lower right area.
Measurements: 30 x 21 cm (drawing); 30 x 21 cm (book).
The iconography of the man smoking is part of the wide and recognizable gallery of figures that Fernando has masterfully developed over time, in fact, there are several paintings by the artist featuring men with cigarettes. This work reflects the artist's hallmark: the exaltation of volume as a vehicle of beauty and visual sensuality, capable of provoking a profound aesthetic experience in the viewer.
Fernando Botero was a painter, sculptor and draftsman, as well as the most internationally recognized contemporary Colombian artist, author of a totally personal figurative language, marked by exalted volumetry. In 1944 he attended the bullfighting school of La Macarena de Medellín, 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.