Exhibition 'Botero - Celebrate Life' in Kunsthal Rotterdam
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.
Visitors will be able to see paintings of life in Latin America based on reminiscences from his youth, and reproductions of classical masters in the recognisable Botero style. The bull-fight and the circus are also featured in these works. Botero’s art is full of Latin American life. The gigantic, inflated bodies and objects appear weightless in spite of their volume, which sometimes even seems to make them look as if they are floating. This volume is a recurrent feature in Botero’s work and gives his art an exuberance that can be comical or moving. The series of female Santas, inspired by the iconic images of female saints, is remarkable. Botero represents them as worldly heroines with meaningful accessories such as a bible or candle, putting their halo in sharp contrast with their clothing and posture.
'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.
