2023-09-18 11:09:38
Known as the “chubby painter”, the artist faced health problems and was recently hospitalized to treat pneumonia
Colombian artist Fernando Botero died this Friday (15), aged 91. He was at his home, in the principality of Monaco, France. According to the international press, the painter, sculptor and draftsman had some health problems caused by old age. In recent days, he was hospitalized due to pneumonia, but left the medical unit to be treated at home.
Born in Medellín, Botero was the creator of the movement known as “boterismo”. The signature in his works was volume, always applied to characters and animals, for example. For this reason, he was popularly called the “fat painter”.
Other points that were common in his works were closed-mouthed characters, good humor, irony, a touch of romanticism and also surrealism, always in a playful tone.
Botero gained fame and popularity in recent decades thanks to his paintings and enormous bronze sculptures, which were exhibited in various places around the world from the 1990s onwards. The three-dimensional works also followed the corpulent aesthetic applied to the canvases. Some are on display in Plaza Botero, located in Fernando Botero’s hometown. The public space functions as an open-air museum and attracts many tourists who visit Medellín.
Career of Fernando Botero
Dedicated, Botero dedicated more than 70 years of his life to art, and was self-taught. He began his career as an illustrator in the late 1940s at the newspaper El Colombiano. Afterwards, he began to study the art of Piero della Francesca (1412-1492), one of the main names in Italian Renaissance art. These studies helped Botero develop his own identity and hone what would later be called “boterism”.
Later on, the Colombian artist attended the Academia San Fernando, in Madrid, Spain, and the Academia San Marcos, in Florence, Italy.
Fernando Botero did not come from a family of artists, but he said he was sure of his craft at a very young age and gained support from his mother. “There was no tradition in my family. I don’t know why I started drawing bulls, landscapes, still lifes, why people came to my paintings… The fact is that at 19 I wanted to be a painter. And my mother left me. At 19, I already had my first exhibition”, he recalled in an interview with El País, in 2019.
Speaking to the newspaper, the painter also revisited the moment he realized he had created his own style. “The first truly boterian thing I made was a mandolin. I was attracted to the breadth and generosity of the exterior of his body and the smallness of the detail. That sketch was my starting point,” he said.
Reinterpretation of classics
During his career, the Colombian Fernando Botero made numerous reinterpretations of classic works, reinterpreting one of the most famous Western oil paintings: the Mona Lisa, by Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), in 1978. However, he inserted a whole aesthetic into it. “boteriana”, that is, quite corpulent. Another version in which Botero added his signature was that of the Arnolfini Couple, the most famous painting by painter Jan van Eyck.
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