Contemporary Art

Born in 1932, in Medellin, Colombia.
Botero is one of the world' s most commercially successful living artists, with strong markets in Europe, the U.S., South America and the Far East. Better known as a painter, he has been sculpting since the 1960s when he lived in New York. In 1975 in Paris, he began casting his sculptures with their distinctive shapes, in bronze. Today, the sculptures are made primarily in Pietrasanta in Tuscany, Italy, home of some of the most famous foundries in the world. He shuttles between New York, Paris, Pietrasanta, and Bogota.

Botero's colossal pieces fashioned from smaller models were not taken particularly seriously in the contemporary art world until their series of installations along the avenues of the world's principal cities. Brooks Adams of Art in America speculated that "Botero should be understood as a latter-day Baroque showman who succeeded in conquering the metropolis with his down-to-earth parade of mythical charged creatures: a raucous bird, a phallic cat, humans ranging from lovable village types of stylized, over-muscled athletes and fecund-looking female nudes."

Botero's bronzes present his characteristic world of swollen forms. "My subject matter is sometimes satirical," he has said of his works. "These `puffed-up' personalities are teeing `puffed' to give them sensuality.... In art, as long as you have ideas and think, you are bound to deform nature. Art is deformation. There are no works of art that are truly realistic." "I think you have to create a thing that functions within very free, imaginative, and innovative parameters," Botero has remarked. "You do not create beauty from classical canons. The problem consists of surprising and being surprised. You have to find something that yields peace and balance' despite the overwhelming and the disproportionate." ...

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