Colombian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero, famous for his voluptuous figures and considered one of the greatest artists of the 20th century, has died.
“Fernando Botero, the painter of our traditions and our mistakes, the painter of our virtues, is dead,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro announced on Friday on the X network (formerly Twitter).
“The painter of our violence and our peace. “Of the dove that was rejected a thousand times and placed on its throne a thousand times,” added the head of state, alluding to one of the artist’s emblematic animals.
He did not provide any further information about the place of his death. Fernando Botero, born in 1932 in Medellin, central Colombia, is considered one of the greatest artists of the 20th century.
According to the Colombian press, which in unison on Friday morning greeted “the greatest Colombian artist of all time”, the master’s health had deteriorated in recent days and he was suffering in particular from pneumonia.
“Leave this world”
“I often think about death and it makes me sad to leave this world and no longer be able to work because I take great joy in my work,” confided the “Maestro” to AFP in an interview on the occasion of his 80th birthday this year 2012.
As the son of a sales representative, he came into contact with art at an early age. At the age of 15, he was already selling his bullfighting drawings outside the gates of the Bogotá bullring.
“When I started, in Colombia it was an exotic job that was not well respected and had no future. When I told my family that I planned to pursue painting, they replied: “Okay, but we can’t help you,” said the world’s most popular Colombian artist. .
After his first solo exhibition in Bogotá in the 1950s, he traveled to Europe and stayed in Spain, France and Italy, where he discovered classical art. His work is also influenced by the pre-Columbian art and frescoes of Mexico, where he later settled.
His career began in the 1970s when he met the director of the German Museum in New York, Dietrich Malov, with whom he organized several successful exhibitions. “Completely unknown, without a contract with a gallery in New York, I was then contacted by the biggest art dealers in the world,” he said.
The extraordinary dimension of his art, which would become his trademark, was revealed in the 1957 painting “Still Life with Mandolin”. He then painted the mandolin’s central sound hole (opening) too small compared to the size of the instrument.
He explained: “Between the small detail and the generosity of the exterior design, a new dimension emerges, more volumetric, more monumental, more extravagant.”
Not big”
For the artist, the term “fat” did not fit his figures. A lover of the Italian Renaissance, he described himself as a “defender of volume” in modern art. His sculpture, also characterized by gigantism, occupied a very important place in his career and developed mainly in Pietrasanta in Italy.
For years he spent his life between this corner of Tuscany, New York, Medellin and Monaco, where he continued to create.
The artist, who said he never knew what he would paint the next day, was inspired by the beauty but also the torment of his country, marked by an armed conflict that lasted more than half a century.
In 1995, a bomb at the foot of his sculpture “The Bird” in Medellín killed 27 people. Five years later he donated a replica called “The Bird of Peace.”
His work shows guerrilla fighting, earthquakes and brothels. He also painted a series about the prisoners of the American prison at Abu Ghraib in Iraq.
The artist was also a major supporter, whose donations were estimated at more than $200 million. He donated many of his works to the museums of Medellín and Bogota, as well as dozens of paintings from his private collection, including Picasso, Monet, Renoir, Miro…
On his 90th birthday, his hometown dedicated an exhibition to him to say “thank you.”
His works can also be seen outdoors in many cities around the world, as exhibitions in public spaces represent a “revolutionary approach” of art to the public for the artist.
An idea he brought to life in 1992 on the Champs-Élysées in Paris, then near the Grand Canal in Venice and opposite the pyramids of Egypt. His statues also traveled to China in 2015.
The “Maestro” was married three times, most recently to the Greek sculptor Sophia Vari, and suffered the death of one of his children in a car accident at the age of four.
His work, consisting of more than 3,000 paintings and 300 sculptures, shows his insatiable urge to create. Just the thought of going without brushes “scares me more than death,” he said.