Botero

"One of the most popular artists alive today, Fernando Botero creates paintings with a powerful monumentality that immediately captures the viewer. The joyfully rotund humans who populate his canvasses are among the most recognizable figures in twentieth-century art. But it is women in particular who have always fascinated Botero and make up the core of his long career. This deluxe volume, the first devoted solely to this theme, includes 50 unpublished works and a total of more than 150 paintings, drawings and sketches. With their bulbous figures and solid flesh, Botero's women evoke a primal sensuality and voluptuousness. But, they are also betrayed with a playful sense of humor and underlying irony. Never voyeuristic, his paintings are more complex celebrations of the female form - its palpable plentitude, its sensual exuberance, and its impenetrable mystery." -- back cover.

Colombian-born Fernando Botero (b. 1932) is a painter, sculptor, and draftsman renowned for his extravagantly rounded figures combining the polish and excess of Spanish colonial baroque with the social realism of the Mexican muralists. Their humorous exaggeration belies the more serious content of Botero’s work—commentary on colonialism, political instability in Latin America, and the vernacular artistic traditions of the region, as well as European art history. Accompanying the artist’s first American retrospective in over thirty years, The Baroque World of Fernando Botero is the most extensive study of his life and work to date. Drawn exclusively from Botero’s private collection, the 100 works featured in this book, including previously unpublished paintings and drawings, represent the full scope of his oeuvre from a uniquely personal perspective. Many of these—portraits of friends and family members and remembered scenes—have remained in the artist’s possession since their creation, while others he has bought back over the years as markers of significant developments in his career. Three essays examine the artist’s creative life, from the aesthetic environment in which Botero developed his unique style to his catalyzing influence on the Colombian art world of the 1960s and 70s.

November 4 - December 5, 1998

The story of how Fernando Botero developed his iconic "Boterismo" style Colombian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero (born 1932) is one of the best-known and most celebrated living Latin American artists. His distinctive visual style of softly rounded, inflated shapes--so idiosyncratic that it is described as "Boterismo"--is instantly recognizable all around the world. But in spite of the visual familiarity of Botero's work--or perhaps, in part, because of it--Botero is, in some ways, a largely unknown artist. How did he transition from the naturalistic illustrations of his teenage years to his mature Boterismo style? Botero: The Search for a Style tells the story of the artist's search for his own unique visual identity in the first 15 years of his career. Assimilating the influences of pre-Columbian and Spanish colonial art, the work of Diego Rivera and the Mexican muralists, and the Old Masters at the Prado Museum and the Louvre, Botero gradually developed his distinctive understanding of form and volume. Botero: The Search for a Style excavates the hidden histories within Fernando Botero's inimitable style.

The work of contemporary Colombian artist Fernando Botero is well known throughout the world. His exaggerated rendering of fleshy human, animal, and still-life figures has become an unmistakable characteristic of his style. This beautifully illustrated volume is one of the few to focus solely on Botero's sculpture, which provides an ideal medium for his exploration of space and volume. The book showcases works in small and medium format as well as the famous monumental works that have made Botero the leading sculptor of the 20th century.

Pleasantly plump With whimsical irony and a style reminiscent of the old masters, Fernando Botero (b.1932) began painting caricatured animals and corpulent bodies with disproportionate heads at a time when his contemporaries were fervently rejecting figurative work in favor of abstraction. More recently he has expanded into sculpture, creating delightful large-scale bronze works portraying the same sorts of voluminous figures he so loved to paint. Like the writings of Gabriel García Márquez or the music of Astor Piazzola, Botero's work has come to represent modern Latin American culture. About the Series: Each book in TASCHEN's Basic Art series features: a detailed chronological summary of the life and oeuvre of the artist, covering his or her cultural and historical importance a concise biography approximately 100 illustrations with explanatory captions

"I am not going turn Colombia's suffering into a business, declared Ferdinand Botero, and so he donated these powerful paintings to the National Museum of Colombia in Bogota rather than sell them. Botero created these intensely personal pieces in private over the last several years and this catalog is the first presentation of them to the art world. As an artist deeply connected to his native country, these images are quickly seen as Botero's wish for redemption from Colombia's current social crisis. Many of these images will startle the eyes that expect only Botero's joyous, voluminous portraits. The truths in these works overcome all preconceptions of his style: these are startling pictures of civil strife, as intensely realized as Goya's Disasters of War and as spontaneous and immediate as Picasso's Guernica was in 1939. "--Publisher's description.

Bullfight: Paintings and Works on Paper is Glitterati's second collection of works by world-renowned Colombian artist Fernando Botero. Featuring more than 140 oils paintings and 35 drawings, this book is a comprehensive look at another of the artist's most iconic subjects. In his youth, Botero developed a passion for bullfighting that has remained with him throughout his illustrious, six-decade career. The artist was profoundly influenced by the spectacle of the bullring - the vivid colors, the dynamic movement, the beauty and violence, bravery and fear. In Botero's signature style, the figures of the bullfight appear inflated and voluptuous, a grandiose exploration of scale, space, and volume. Matadors and picadors, horses and bulls, spirited crowds and striking portraits - all are exaggerated and exalted by the hand of the artist. As Jose Manuel Caballero Bonald writes, "His task is not to reproduce reality as it appears before the naked eye but rather to reinvent or reconstruct it according to his personal experience and accumulated feelings. In this sense there is no painter more truly Colombian than Botero. And yet, the more genuinely local his art is, the more universal it becomes."

The paintings and drawings collected in this book provide an overview of the artists's work in these media and fascinating glimpse into his unique artistic world. The book also includes an introduction that discusses Botero's place in contemporary art, an interview with the artist, as well as six short stories by him.