Fernando Botero

Woman in a red dress, 1975.
Watercolor and pencil on paper, 50 x 35,5 cm, with signature and date lower right. This watercolor was in a local sale in Belgium to-day.
Another fine watercolor of Botero was with Christie's in the "Latin American Sale" in New York on 17 - 18 November 2009, lot 35.


Fernando Botero was born April 19, 1932, Medellín, Colombia. He is a Colombian artist known for his paintings and sculptures of inflated human and animal shapes.

Botero studied at the San Fernando Academy and, from 1953 until 1955, studied fresco technique and art history in Florence and copied Giotto, which has influenced his painting ever since.
He visit to the United States in the late 1950s prompted a return to live and work in New York for ten years beginning in 1960. Although Abstract Expressionism interested him, he sought his primary inspiration from the Italian Renaissance.

In 1973 Botero moved to Paris, where his first sculptures where executed. Temporarily he only attended to sculptures before resuming painting in 1978. In 1983 he settled in Tuscany.

“A painted landscape is always more beautiful than a real one, because there's more there. Everything is more sensual, and one takes refuge in its beauty. And man needs spiritual expression and nourishing. It's why even in the prehistoric era, people would scrawl pictures of bison on the walls of caves. Man needs music, literature, and painting-all those oases of perfection that make up art-to compensate for the rudeness and materialism of life.”



Litterature:

Llosa, Mario Vargas and F. Botero, Botero Dessins et Aquarelles, Paris 1984.
Botero, Fernando; Et Al., Botero a Venezia, U.S. 2003.
W. Spies, ed., Fernando Botero: Paintings and Drawings, Munich, 1992.
E.J. Sullivan, Botero: Drawings and Watercolors, New York, 1993.




Photograph: m.w.