Fernando Botero

FERNANDO BOTERO (Medellín, Colombia, 1932- Monaco, 2023).
ARTIKA Publishing House.
"Botero's women", 2018.
Unique, limited and numbered edition. Copy 396/2998.
Includes art book, study book and sculpture-case.
Includes notarial act.
Measurements: 61 x 47 cm (case).
The artist's book "Botero's Women" covers Botero's artistic career with special attention to one of the author's most recurrent themes: the female figure. The edition is made up of three pieces: the Art Book, the Study Book and a sculpture-case that holds the two volumes. The sculpture-case has been created specifically to house this unique edition. It is a handcrafted piece, making it a work of art in itself. Its front has a detail of the painting Cabeza, painted by the artist in 2006, in which a slight relief can be seen, a tribute to the volume so characteristic of Fernando Botero's paintings and sculptures.
As for the Art Book, the centerpiece of the work, it opens with a prologue by Nobel Literature Prize winner Mario Vargas Llosa written especially for this edition. It contains 45 plates with drawings personally selected by Fernando Botero. Two types of paper have been used for printing, a watercolor paper and a handmade paper, which imitates the amate paper used by the artist in some of his works.
The drawings show multiple female figures, all of them suggestive, sensual and deeply expressive. The drawings are accompanied by quotations taken from stories published by Botero in the 1980s, which provide an introduction to the artist's universe.
The Study Book, in a bilingual Spanish-English edition, delves deeper into Botero's work, reaching an understanding of the scope of a universal painter. Lourdes Cirlot, professor of Art History, presents some of the most characteristic aspects of the master's work, such as a detailed study of the role of women in Botero's art, the importance of drawing for the artist and his influences. It also includes a chapter dedicated to the analysis of the drawings of Botero's Las mujeres, a detailed study of their composition, technique, theme and symbolism. These specially written texts are accompanied by an exclusive interview of the author with Fernando Botero.
Fernando Botero is the best known contemporary Colombian artist, author of a totally personal figurative language, marked by exalted volumetry. He made his debut when he was only sixteen years old, and since then he has shown his work all over the world. 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.