The chubby world of Fernando Botero (45 photos)

Although he himself was quite a slender man, it so happened that his main theme in his work was fat people and plump people, through the images of which the artist communicated with the world.





Fernando even became the founder of a unique style, which was named boterism in his honor.



Fernando Botero (born April 19, 1932, Medellin, Colombia - died September 15, 2023, Monaco) is a Colombian artist known for his paintings and sculptures of exaggeratedly plump people and animals.

In his youth, Botero attended a school for matadors for several years, but his true calling was art. He began painting as a teenager, inspired by the pre-Columbian and Spanish colonial art around him, as well as the political works of Mexican muralist Diego Rivera.

His own paintings were first exhibited in 1948, and two years later he had his first solo exhibition in Bogotá. While studying painting in Madrid in the early 1950s, he made a living by copying paintings by his idols of the time, Francisco de Goya and Diego Velazquez, and selling them to tourists.



In the 1950s, Botero began experimenting with proportions and sizes. When he moved to New York in 1960, he developed his signature style of depicting round, spherical, deliberately bloated, corpulent people and animals. These works contain references to Latin American folk art.



"Presidential Family"

He favored smoothness in his paintings, eliminating brush marks and the appearance of texture. The bloated proportions of his figures suggest an element of political satire, perhaps hinting at the characters' inflated sense of self-importance, as in the case of The President's Family. His other works include subjects with a comic quality that challenge and satirize sexual mores, as well as portraits of kind families.

In 1973, Botero returned to Paris and began creating sculptures to complement his work on canvas.



"The Death of Pablo Escobar"

Botero also continued to paint, creating scenes of bullfights throughout the 1980s and later finding inspiration in current social issues. In works such as The Death of Pablo Escobar (1999), which depicts the fatal shooting of the leader of the Medellin cartel, he examines the violence and illegal drug industry of his country. In 2004, after it became known about the torture of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers at Abu Ghraib prison, Botero began creating numerous paintings and drawings dedicated to this scandal.



He then turned to lighter themes, creating a series of colorful works depicting circus performers, which was first exhibited in 2008.