![Colombian artist Fernando Botero, a playful portrayer of serious subjects, dies at the age of 91](https://i-invdn-com.investing.com/trkd-images/LYNXMPEJ8E0M8_L.jpg)
©Reuters. Colombian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero sits beneath one of his sculptures during a walk with Medellin Mayor Federico Gutierrez (not pictured) in Medellin, Colombia, January 27, 2017. REUTERS/Fredy Builes/File photo
By Julia Symmes Cobb
BOGOTA (Reuters) – Colombian artist Fernando Botero, whose sculptures and paintings of playful, round subjects in sometimes poignant situations made him one of the richest artists in the world, has died at the age of 91.
Billed as South America’s answer to Picasso, Botero also tackled violence and political topics, including Colombia’s internal conflicts, and portrayed everyday life.
His works have been featured in exhibitions around the world. According to Sotheby’s, his canvases and sculptures sell for more than $2 million each.
The artist’s bodacious subjects were portrayed in everyday situations—a corpulent naked woman lounging on a bed or a strapping man riding a humorously outsized horse—but served the artist’s more serious purpose of transporting the reader to what he called a ‘superlative dimension’. , in which everyday situations took on exaggerated proportions.
Despite the comical plumpness of many of his creations, the artist never shied away from serious subjects; his series of paintings about the Abu Ghraib prison scandal sparked discussion in the art world.
“Fernando Botero has passed away, the painter of our traditions and flaws, the painter of our virtues. The painter of our violence and of peace,” Colombian President Gustavo Petro said on X, the social network formerly known as Twitter.
Although he was widely known for his large subject matter, Botero insisted that his pieces did not focus on body type.
“I don’t paint fat women,” the artist told Spanish newspaper El Mundo in 2014, “nobody believes me, but it’s true. What I paint are volumes.”
Botero’s work sometimes focused on Colombia’s long-running internal conflict – he depicted the aftermath of a car bomb and a group of partygoers threatened by men wielding automatic weapons and bloody machetes.
He also created ironic portraits of public figures, including Manuel Marulanda, the founder of the rebel group Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC).
Botero also paid tribute to classic paintings with witty repetitions – his version of the Mona Lisa is noticeably inflated compared to da Vinci’s original.
But it was his Abu Ghraib series that attracted worldwide attention. The paintings, based on victims’ stories and photographs of the mistreatment of Iraqi prisoners by American soldiers, are explicit and poignant.
The series was exhibited all over the world and attracted tens of thousands of viewers. The New York Times said that the paintings, while not masterpieces, “restore the dignity and humanity of the prisoners without diminishing their pain.”
Botero’s final decades as one of the world’s richest artists were a far cry from his humble beginnings.
Fernando Botero Angulo, the son of a traveling salesman and a seamstress, was born on April 19, 1932 in Medellin, Colombia.
As an artist, Botero tried to make his work accessible by donating more than 200 works to create the Botero Museum in Bogota, which is free and receives half a million visitors a year.
More than a hundred of the pieces were his own, while others were by masters such as Picasso, Dali and Monet.
He donated another 150 works to a museum in Medellin and 23 of his sculptures are located outside in Plaza Botero.
Botero is survived by his wife Sophia Vari, two sons and a daughter. Another son, four years old, died in a car accident in 1974.
Even into his eighties, the artist painted at least eight hours a day.
“I want to die painting,” he told the Colombian newspaper El Tiempo the year he turned 80.