His voluptuous figures, both in paintings and in sculpture, portrayed the high and mighty as well as everyday people through an enlarging prism. An obituary by Stephen Kinzer for The New York Times. Fernando Botero, the Colombian whose voluptuous pictures and sculptures of overstuffed generals, bishops, prostitutes, housewives and other products of his whimsical imagination…
The man who created the fanciful rotundity that has graced the art realm with the exaggerated gordas and relaunched the neo-figurative movement, Colombian-born global artist Fernando Botero died last week at 91 leaving a prolific body of work and an indelible mark on the world of art.
Colombian painter and sculptor Fernando Botero, whose whimsical, ballooning figures gained him worldwide acclaim and elevated the global profile of Latin American art, died in Monaco on September 15 at the age of ninety-one. The cause, according to his close friend Mauricio Vallejo, a co-owner of Houston’s Art of the World gallery, was complications of pneumonia. Botero’s crowd-pleasing works typically played with volume and scale a rotund woman might smoke a miniature cigarette through tiny pursed lips; a hugely curving mandolin might feature a diminutive sound aperture and commented on subjects