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Exhibition of Paintings and Sculptures at Palace of Fine Arts. Mexico City
Style
While his
work includes still-lifes and landscapes,
Botero has concentrated on situational portraiture. His paintings and
sculptures are united by their proportionally exaggerated,
or "fat" figures, as he once referred to them.
Botero
explains his use of these "large people", as they are often called by
critics, in the following way:
"An artist is attracted to certain kinds of form
without knowing why. You adopt a position intuitively; only later do you
attempt to rationalize or even justify it."
Botero is
an abstract artist
in the most fundamental sense, choosing colors, shapes, and proportions based
on intuitive aesthetic thinking. Though he spends only one month a
year in Colombia, he considers himself the "most Colombian artist
living" due to his insulation from the international trends of the art
world.
In 2004
Botero exhibited a series of 27 drawings and 23 paintings dealing with the
violence in Colombia from the drug cartels. He donated the works to the National Museum of Colombia, where they
were first exhibited.
In 2005
Botero gained considerable attention for his Abu Ghraib series,
which was exhibited first in Europe. He based the works on reports of United
States forces' abuses of prisoners at Abu Ghraib prison
during the Iraq War.
Beginning with an idea he had on a plane journey, Botero produced more than 85
paintings and 100 drawings in exploring this concept and "painting
out the poison." The series was exhibited at two United States
locations in 2007, including Washington, DC. Botero said he would not sell any
of the works, but would donate them to museums.
In 2006,
after having focused exclusively on the Abu Ghraib series for over 14 months,
Botero returned to the themes of his early life such as the family and
maternity. In his "Une Famille" Botero represented the Colombian
family, a subject often painted in the seventies and eighties. In his
"Maternity", Botero repeated a composition he already painted in
2003, being able to evoke a sensuous velvety texture that lends it a
special appeal and testifies for a personal involvement of the artist. Interestingly,
the Child in the 2006 drawing has a wound in his right chest as if the Author
wanted to identify him with Jesus Christ, thus giving it a religious meaning
that was absent in the 2003 artwork.
In 2008 he exhibited the works of his The Circus collection,
featuring 20 works in oil and watercolor. In a 2010 interview, Botero said that
he was ready for other subjects: "After all this, I always return to the
simplest things: still lifes. [Wiki]
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