BOTERO. 60 YEARS OF PAINTING: A RETROSPECTIVE OF ONE OF THE GREAT LATIN AMERICAN MASTERS
On 17 September, the CentroCentro in the Spanish capital inaugurated an unprecedented retrospective of Colombian painter Fernando Botero (Medellín, 1932) artwork. Although the exhibition was managed by a collaboration between Espacio Arthemisia and the City Council of the Community of Madrid, Botero. 60 años de pintura (Botero. 60 years of painting) has been supervised by the painter himself.
Under the curatorship of Cristina Carrillo de Albornoz —art critic and curator with an international career that includes institutions such as the Hermitage Museum and the National Gallery of Berlin— in collaboration with the actress Lina Botero, the artist's daughter, the exhibition was scheduled to close its doors on February 7th. However, the public reception has been so good (more than 60,000 people have passed through CentroCentro to see Botero's work) that the date has been extended until Sunday 28th.
Absolutely focused in painting, Fernando Botero has been producing his oeuvre for seventy years. His early recognition in the late 1950s and early 1960s is mainly due to a series of paintings in which the artist took the iconography of the Western canon and manipulated it. In that series Botero made his own version of Leonardo da Vinci's La Gioconda (1503) and Raphael's Pope Leo X and Two Cardinals (1518), among many others. The figures and subjects appropriated by the Colombian artist underwent a process of deformation in which volume and curves questioned the classical and modern parameters of beauty. Later, this aesthetic characteristic would become the hallmark of his career.
Botero. 60 años de pintura covers this first stage and all the subsequent ones. Almost seventy large-format paintings make up the entire exhibition. According to Carrillo de Albornoz and Lina Botero, the exhibition is divided into seven thematic axes: Latin America, Versions, Still Lifes, Religion, The Bullfight, Circus and Watercolours on Canvas. Each of these axes not only responds to a different stage of exploration throughout his career, but also allows visitors to observe the artistic evolution of one of the greatest Latin American painters of the 20th century.
As for the Watercolours on Canvas, it has been a proposal to exhibit Botero's most recent works, many of them unpublished. At the age of 88, Botero is still working and, as CentroCentro states, it is no "coincidence that his career began with watercolours, the most popular technique at the time in Colombia". However, what the artist does in this new series of watercolours presented is to treat them as if they were frescoes. Regarding the evolution of his work, Botero says in an interview with the curator: "My evolution goes directly towards the creation of static atmospheres, providing figures and objects with a supreme and spectacular calm".
In short, Fernando Botero’s exhibition at the CentroCentro in Madrid is a unique experience to get to know in depth the artwork of the Colombian painter, his growth and maturity as an artist. Rarely is the collection of a living master presented, here is one of those times.
GENERAL INFORMATION:
Exhibition: Botero. 60 años de pintura, by Fernando Botero
Curator: Cristina Carrillo de Albornoz, former UN diplomat, art critic and curator.
When: 17/ 09/ 2020 - 28/ 02/ 2021
Where: Centro Centro
