Fernando Botero

Last year me and my partner had a holiday in Germany. The first week we stayed in Goslar, a very beautifull old town in the area Harz. Walking through the streets of Goslar we suddenly stood for two lovely statues. Because I love the paintings and sculptures of Fernando Botero I knew at the same time that these two sculptures belonged to Botero.
It made my day.



Botero, born as the son of a Colombian travelling salesman was trained as a matador from the age of twelve. The bullfighting ring was his inspiration to his early drawings. After his study in Madrid at the Academia San Fernando and the Prado-Museum Botero went to Italy where he began studying art history in Florence in 1953. Two years later he returned to Columbia , moved to Mexico in 1956 and settled in New York in 1960. Here he was awarded the Guggenheim National Prize for Columbia. Botero's very refined paintings show grotesquely fat beings, monsters, unable to move, with gigantic heads, which represent the degenerate colonial bourgeoisie in his country. He developed a naïve, almost child-like figurative style in the 1950s, which is associated with the New York Pop-Art. Botero's highly valued works are technically perfect and have pale colours. He lives and works in New York and Paris.