1932-2013
Latest News: Fernando Botero Dies at Age 91
Famed Colombian sculptor and painter Fernando Botero died September 15 of pneumonia complications, according to the Associated Press. His daughter, Lina, first reported his passing to Colombian radio station Caracol. Known for his paintings of people and objects in colorful, inflated forms, Botero had his work displayed globally in museums and was beloved in Colombia partly because of his philanthropy. He donated 23 statues throughout the country and gave 180 paintings to Colombia’s Central Bank, which were later used to create the Botero Museum in capital Bogota. “The painter of our traditions and our defects, the painter of our virtues has died,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro wrote in a social media post.
Who Was Fernando Botero?
Fernando Botero left matador school as a child to become an artist, displaying his work for the first time in 1948 as a teenager. His subsequent art, now exhibited in major cities worldwide, concentrates on situational portraiture united by his subjects’ proportional exaggeration. Botero’s bronze sculptures can be seen throughout the world in the parks of many European and Latin American capital cities. The painter and sculptor died on September 15, 2023, at age 91.
Quick Facts
FULL NAME: Fernando Botero Angulo
BORN: April 19, 1932
DIED: September 15, 2023
BIRTHPLACE: Medellín, Colombia
SPOUSES: Gloria Zea (1955-1960), Cecilia Zambrano (1964-1975), and Sophia Vari (1978-2023)
CHILDREN: Fernando, Lina, Juan Carlos, and Pedro
ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Aries
Early Years
Born in Medellín, Colombia, on April 19, 1932, Fernando Botero Angulo attended a matador school for several years in his youth, then left the bull ring behind to pursue an artistic career. Botero’s paintings were first exhibited in 1948, when he was 16 years old, and he had his first one-man show three years later in Bogota.
Botero’s work in these early years was inspired by pre-Colombian and Spanish colonial art and the political murals of Mexican artist Diego Rivera. Also influential were the works of his artistic idols at the time, Francisco de Goya and Diego Velázquez. By the early 1950s, Botero had begun studying painting in Madrid, where he made his living copying paintings that hung in the Prado and selling the copies to tourists.
Paintings and Sculptures
Fernando Botero stands in front of one of his paintings displayed at a gallery in Aix en Provence, France, in 2017.
Throughout the 1950s, Botero experimented with proportion and size, and he began developing his trademark style—round, bloated humans and animals—after he moved to New York City in 1960. The inflated proportions of his figures, including those in Presidential Family (1967), suggest an element of political satire and are depicted using flat, bright color and prominently outlined forms—a nod to Latin-American folk art. And while his paintings includes still lifes and landscapes, Botero typically concentrated on his emblematic situational portraiture.
After reaching an international audience with his art, Botero moved to Paris in 1973, where he began creating sculptures. These works extended the foundational themes of his painting, as he again focused on his bloated subjects. As his sculpture developed, by the 1990s, outdoor exhibitions of huge bronze figures were staged around the world to great success.
In 2004, Botero turned to the overtly political, exhibiting a series of drawings and paintings focusing on the violence in Colombia stemming from drug cartel activities. In 2005, he unveiled his “Abu Ghraib” series, based on reports of American military forces abusing prisoners at the Abu Ghraib prison during the Iraq War. The series took him more than 14 months to complete and received considerable attention when it was first exhibited in Europe.
In 2013, Botero unveiled the book Circus: Paintings and Works on Paper, which showcased 137 paintings, 31 drawings, and 22 watercolors from 2007 through 2008. Botero was inspired by his trips to the circus as a young boy in Colombia. “Everything seemed gigantic. There were some very big dogs… they seemed like huge bears. The circus leaves a sweet memory,” he said, according to Reuters.
Botero’s art continues to appear in exhibits around the world.
Personal Life
Sophia Vari and Fernando Botero were married for 45 years. In this circa 1988 photo, they sit near one of Botero’s sculptures outside their home in Italy.
Botero was married three times. His wed his most recent wife, the Greek artist Sophia Vari, in 1978. She died in May 2023.
The famed artist had three children from his first marriage to Gloria Zea: sons Fernando and Juan Carlos, as well as a daughter named Lina. Botero also had a son named Pedro with his second wife, Cecilia Zambrano. Pedro died at age 4 in a car accident in 1974. Botero, who was driving the vehicle, lost parts of two fingers in the wreck and some movement in his right arm. He would say the best painting he ever did was of his late son. “I still had the bandages on when I painted it,” he said.
Death
Botero died from complications of pneumonia on September 15, 2023. The 91-year-old was in Monaco, where he had a home, at the time.
Botero’s daughter, Lina, said that although the artist was too weak to stand and hold larger brushes recently, he continued to work in his studio in Monaco regularly. “He couldn’t work on oil paintings. But he was experimenting with water paintings,” she said.
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