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 Drawn exclusively from Botero’s private collection, the 100 works featured in this book, including previously unpublished paintings and drawings, represent the full scope of his oeuvre from a uniquely personal perspective.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.

"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.

November 4 - December 5, 1998

"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.

This volume traces the history of painting from medieval times to modern times with a focus on each era and its major artists. This volume traces the history of painting from medieval times to modern times with a focus on each era and its major artists.

Over the course of some two centuries following the conquests and consolidations of Spanish rule in the Americas during the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries—the period designated as the Baroque—new cultural forms sprang from the cross-fertilization of Spanish, Amerindian, and African traditions. This dynamism of motion, relocation, and mutation changed things not only in Spanish America, but also in Spain, creating a transatlantic Hispanic world with new understandings of personhood, place, foodstuffs, music, animals, ownership, money and objects of value, beauty, human nature, divinity and the sacred, cultural proclivities—a whole lexikon of things in motion, variation, and relation to one another. Featuring the most creative thinking by the foremost scholars across a number of disciplines, the Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque is a uniquely wide-ranging and sustained exploration of the profound cultural transfers and transformations that define the transatlantic Spanish world in the Baroque era. Pairs of authors—one treating the peninsular Spanish kingdoms, the other those of the Americas—provocatively investigate over forty key concepts, ranging from material objects to metaphysical notions. Illuminating difference as much as complementarity, departure as much as continuity, the book captures a dynamic universe of meanings in the various midst of its own re-creations. The Lexikon of the Hispanic Baroque joins leading work in a number of intersecting fields and will fire new research—it is the indispensible starting point for all serious scholars of the early modern Spanish world.

This summer Kunsthal Rotterdam is proud to present a large-scale retrospective of the world-famous Colombian artist Fernando Botero (1932). This selection from Botero's own collection provides a panorama of the artist's personal favourites from his considerable oeuvre. "Botero: Celebrate Life!" will exhibit almost a hundred paintings, sketches and pastels as well as a few sculptures, including the enormous eye-catcher 'Caballo,' Botero's famous sculpture of a horse. 'Botero: Celebrate Life!' shows how Fernando Botero creates a magical world full of characters and scenes from daily life, of which politics and religion form an important part. Although his work appears at first sight to be airy and light-hearted, the violent history of his native country Colombia can be felt. His origin and background have influenced Botero profoundly, which finds expression directly in his works of the president, executions and weeping widows, and indirectly in his paintings of people partying, dancing with expressionless faces under the light of naked light bulbs. Exhibition: Kunsthal Rotterdam, The Netherlands (July 2 2016-11 September 2016).