May 10 - June 16, 2001

The work of contemporary Colombian artist Fernando Botero is well known throughout the world. His exaggerated rendering of fleshy human, animal, and still-life figures has become an unmistakable characteristic of his style. This beautifully illustrated volume is one of the few to focus solely on Botero's sculpture, which provides an ideal medium for his exploration of space and volume. The book showcases works in small and medium format as well as the famous monumental works that have made Botero the leading sculptor of the 20th century.

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 Drawn exclusively from Botero’s private collection, the 100 works featured in this book, including previously unpublished paintings and drawings, represent the full scope of his oeuvre from a uniquely personal perspective.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

"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 This deluxe volume, the first devoted solely to this theme, includes 50 unpublished works and a total of more than 150 paintings, drawings and sketches.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.

November 4 - December 5, 1998