Translations:Fernando Botero/12/en

In 1977, he exhibited his sculptures for the first time at the Grand Palais in Paris. Including some previous works made with acrylic paste that date back to the early sixties, Botero today has an abundant three-dimensional oeuvre, especially in bronze and marble. Reading the artist's own texts that comment on his sculptures, one can easily understand the archaization that characterizes of all his three-dimensional works. Botero speaks, for example, of again confronting the problem of seeking the spirit of colonial sculpture, within traditional materials such as bronze or marble, with roots in pre-Columbian art and taking inspiration from popular Mexican art pieces.

It cannot be denied that in the best workshops of Pietrasanta in Tuscany, Italy, Botero has produced sculptures of a remarkably high quality, especially when he has enlarged a fragment of the human body or created an absurd contrast between two figures or parts of a body. Botero has received recognition, such as the exhibition of his sculptures in the Champs Elysees in Paris (1992) and on Fifth Avenue in New York (1993), as well as the exhibition La corrida in the Luis Angel Arango Library in Bogota (1993). Even today, Botero seems inexhaustible. Creator of an unmistakable "race," possessor of an unlimited imagination, taster of the best classical painters, connoisseur of all the traditional crafts of painting, drawing, and sculpture, legitimate son of Colombia and Latin America, the image maker from Antioquia assures us that the problem lies not in changing but in deepening [See Volume 6, Art, p. 127-128].