Fernando Botero “Recent Paintings”

Marlborough (Midtown)

[image: Fernando Botero "Musicos y cantante" (2017) oil on canvas, 46 x 38 1/8 in.]

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The Directors of Marlborough Gallery present paintings by the world-renowned artist Fernando Botero. These new works revisit the major subjects he has depicted over the course of his career.

The familiar figures in paintings by Botero are as voluptuous as they are charismatic. Whether he is depicting female nudes, bullfighters, dance hall denizens, clowns, revelers, lovers, Grandes Dames, musicians, families or a bowl of fruit, Botero’s skill and style make the work unmistakably his own. As writer David Ebony puts it, “Art audiences, critics, and collectors see the famously rotund figures that populate his compositions as emblematic archetypes: sensuous icons of plenty, of good health and good fortune.”

For the artist, form and color work together to illuminate the
heightened reality of each painted figure or scene. In Botero’s
paintings no element is gratuitous – “everything is necessary” as
he explains. Although a figurative painter, he achieves a balance
in composition and color that shows his understanding and
assimilation of the essential tenets of abstraction. Light, created by
his synthesis of colors, is especially important. Botero never paints
heavy shadows as he considers them the enemy of color. He has
stated, “I would say that in my painting there is an interior light that is like morning light. What most resembles this internal, color-like “light” is the light of the morning hours…everything is clearer and more uniform.”

Fernando Botero was born in Medellín, Colombia in 1932. Since his first solo gallery show in 1951, the artist has been exhibited in museums all over the world. He began showing with Marlborough Gallery in 1972. Over the past forty years he has held numerous museum exhibitions in the following countries: Argentina, Belgium, Canada, China, Colombia, France, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Italy, Japan, Mexico, the Netherlands, Portugal, South Korea, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, Turkey, Venezuela, and the United States.

Botero’s work can be found in over fifty museums worldwide. They include: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.; Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Caracas, Venezuela; Museo de Arte Moderno, Bogota, Colombia; Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Santiago, Chile; The Museum of Modern Art, New York; Neue Pinakothek, Munich, Germany; Pushkin Museum, Moscow, Russia; The Baltimore Museum of Art, Maryland; the Israel Museum, Jerusalem; The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, New York; Wallraf-Richartz Museum, Cologne, Germany; and The State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, Russia.