About Fernando Botero

He refers to himself as 'the most Colombian of Colombian artists', probably because his works are representative of his Columbian roots. Settled in Paris now, Fernando Botero Angulo was born on 19 April 1932 in Medellín, Antioquia, Colombia. A field painter and sculptor, he is best described as a neo-figurative artist, and came into the limelight when he won the first prize at the Salón de Artistas Colombianos in 1952.

Fernando Botero has been called an abstract artist, choosing colors, shapes and proportions on intuitive aesthetic thinking. He has created parodies of the works of Albrecht Dürer, Pierre Bonnard, Diego Velázquez. And critics have named his figures 'large people' as the exaggerated proportions and corpulence of the human and animal figures in his paintings and sculptures stand out strongly, painted as they are in bright decorative hues. His paintings and sculptures (notably monumental bronzes) typically include individual and family portraits, nudes, equestrian figures, bullfighting scenes and still-life. To this he responds: "An artist does not know why he is attracted to certain kinds of form. The position is adopted position intuitively and it's only later that you analyse it."

Fernando Botero lost his father when he was just two years old and did not
visit museums or have any other cultural experiences during his childhood. But by the age of 16, his first illustration was published in El Colombiano, the Colombian newspaper. He paid for his high school education at the Liceo de Marinilla de Antioquia by earning through illustrations.

His personal exposition was held in 1952 in Bogotá at the Leo Matiz gallery. He also won the IX edition of the Salón de Artistas Colombianos in the same year and went to Europe to study the arts. He attended the Academy of San Fernando in Madrid, was strongly influenced by Velázquez, Goya, Diego Rivera and admired the frescoes in Florence.

In 1956-57, he went on a visit to Mexico where muralism influenced him. He lived in New York City (1960-73) before moving to Paris. Since the 1990s, his work gained darker shades as the drug-fueled guerrilla warfare raged in Colombia. He created paintings and drawings of kidnappings, massacres, torture and death. And the theme continues in paintings that depict the abuse of detainees at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison.