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The famous Colombian artist Fernando Botero passed away at the age of ninety-one, in his home in the Principality of Monaco, after having fought tenaciously against severe pneumonia. Famous for his voluptuous, rounded, sometimes “bulky” figures, Botero was a painter and sculptor who symbolized Colombian prosperity together with writers of the caliber of Gabriel García Márquez or the Mexican artist Diego Riviera. Founder of the boterismo movement, he made extra-large figures, women and men who fill and dominate the spaces with absolute joie de vivre, the protagonists of his works.
Farewell to the great Colombian artist Fernando Botero
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His painting recalls the echoes of Piero della Francesca, it is enough to remember the famous Portraits of Federico da Montefeltro and his wife Battista Sforza from 1472, present in the Uffizi in Florence, but with the addition of the roundness and mammothness of the very current Jenny Saville in works such as Propped, sold for the record sum of 9.5 million pounds at Sotheby’s London, subverting common standards of female beauty. Botero’s is in fact an invitation to non-conformism, a magical and out-of-scale realism that does not deny the person, but increases it in size and depth, literally.
Today, September 15th, we mourn the death of a painter who embodies the symbol of those who enjoy life with broad brushstrokes: with heaviness of body, but lightness of spirit. Botero’s figures are never frowning or sad, but always seraphically painted in the right (large) place.
Medellin
Born in 1932 in Medellín, Colombia, he became passionate – while traveling through Italy and Spain – of all the art of Titian and Goya, and of the Renaissance art of Michelangelo, Mantegna and Raphael. His famous work Mona Lisa at the age of twelve, exhibited at the MoMA in New York and his love for the Parisian avant-garde, before drawing inspiration for his unmistakable style.
Pietrasanta
He spent his last years in his studio in Pietrasanta, falling madly in love with Versilia, his second home.