Fernando BOTERO (1932 - 2023) ✿

Fernando Botero Angulo (Medellín, 19 April 1932 – Monaco, 15 September 2023) was a Colombian painter, sculptor and designer with giant shapes and bodies. At 16 he was already drawing illustrations for the newspaper "El Colombiano". And in 1948 he exhibited for the first time in Medellín.

In 1952 Fernando Botero won second prize at the Artists' Fair in Bogota and, with the money from the winnings, went to Europe to admire the works of Francisco Goya and Tiziano Vecellio at the Prado Museum where, for a certain period, he worked as a copyist, while attending the Royal Academy of San Fernando.

During the journey he passed through Paris and stopped in Italy, where between 1953 and 1955 he discovered the Italian Renaissance and studied the fresco technique, made several copies of Giotto's works and studied the many Sienese artists.

In 1955 Fernando Botero returned to Colombia, where the French avant-garde was in fashion, which differed greatly from his style. Embittered, he moved to Mexico with his newly married wife and experienced, for the first time on canvas, the dilation of the forms of his models.

In 1958, the year in which he won first prize at the XI Salon of Colombian artists, Botero exhibited in Washington at the Gres Gallery. In 1969 he exhibited in Paris, where he settled in 1973 and continued to dedicate himself to sculpture. In 1983 he returned to Italy and opened a studio in Pietrasanta, where he stayed for a few months of the year, to be close to the marble quarries. In fact, we remember the exhibition of his enormous sculptures on the Champs-Élysées in 1992, and others in the public spaces of some European cities in 1994.