(MENAFN- Newsroom Panama)
The Colombian master Fernando Botero, who died this Friday at the age of 91, was the artist of the voluminfigures,“not fat”, as he used to clarify, a work that made him a universal artist and that today is distributed in the form of paintings and sculptures in museums and squares around the world.
Born April 19, 1932 in Medellín, Fernando Botero Angulo traveled through contemporary and modern art, but it was his figurative style, developed through the soft forms of his plump figures, that gave him worldwide fame.
“He doesn't like the word 'fat' at all, he would banish it; He is a painter of volumes,” highlighted last March by MarOropesa, curator of the exhibition“Botero: Sensuality and Melancholy,” presented in Valencia (Spain).
The beginning
Botero's career began when he joined the newspaper El Colombiano as an illustrator in his adolescence.
Those first steps allowed him, at the age of 19, in 1951, to fulfill his first dream and hold an individual exhibition at the Leo Matiz Gallery in Bogotá.
Since he was little he was interested in painting and also in bullfighting, since an uncle of his enrolled him in a school for bullfighters and that world is very present in his work.
His first artistic influences were the Mexican muralists Diego Rivera, David Alfaro Siqueiros, and Antonio González Orozco, as well as colonial baroque altarpieces.
In 1952, Botero received second prize at the National Artists' Salon, which allowed him to travel to Europe. and developed his artistic life in Florence where he studied at the Academy of San Marco.
The painter and sculptor also studied at the Royal Academy of Art of San Fernando, in Madrid, and began exhibiting in the 1960s in the United States, with a first exhibition at the Milwaukee Art Center where he began to show his characteristic figurative style.
He also lived in Paris, where he spent much of his time in the Louvre Museum, and in MexCity, where he painted a volumetric mandolin with which he opened the doors of the style that characterizes his work.
His works are spread across cities around the world, but the milestone that marked his universality occurred in 2015 and 2016 when he held his first comprehensive and retrospective exhibition in settings such as the National Museum of China in Beijing, located in Tiananmen Square, and the China Art Museum in Shanghai.
Aware of the importance of his work, Botero donated a large part of his works to his native country
The Botero Museum, which houses the most complete collection of his work, was created in 1998 with the donation he made to the Bank of the Republic of 123 works of his authorship and 87 by international artists.
Guggenheim award
Botero won numerinternational recognitions, among which the Guggenheim International Award in 1957 stands out, which earned him an exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum in New York and made him an international name.
In 1969 he had his first major exhibition at the Claude Bernard Gallery in Paris and in 1972 at the Marlborough Gallery in New York. The following year he moved to Paris, where he made his first sculptures, which he showed for the first time at the Art Fair in the French capital.
In April 2022, his native Medellín celebrated his 90th birthday in style as a gesture of gratitude for illuminating with his works a city that was in darkness due to drug trafficking violence.
His works have been featured in million-dollar auctions, such as in 2022, when the sculpture“Man on Horseback” fetched $4.3 million at Christie's.
Botero was married three times. His first wife was Gloria Zea, between 1955 and 1960, and they had three children. In 1964 he married Cecilia Zambrano, with whom he had his fourth child, Pedrito (1970-1974) and they divorced in 1975. Since 1978 he was married to the painter and jewelry designer of Greek origin Sofía Vari, who died in May of this year.
Incurable pain
A moment that changed his life and his work occurred in 1974 when his third son, four-year-old Pedrito, died in a traffic accident in Madrid in which the artist almost lost a hand.
The pain - both physical and psychological - was so deep that this fateful moment marked a complex stage in his work, lasting a year, in which he dedicated himself solely and exclusively to painting his son.
The last exhibition before his death, titled“Sensuality and Melancholy,” was inaugurated on Thursday in Murcia (Spain), to show his artistic evolution through works from variperiods ranging from the 70s to more recent creations.