Woman by Fernando Botero

Provenance:
Gary Nader Fine Art, Miami
Private collection, Ontario

Literature:
Fernando Botero, Lina Botero, Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa, "Fernando Botero. Celebración. Celebration," Spain, 2012, page 50

Born in Medellín, in the Andes Mountains of Columbia, Fernando Botero was first introduced to ancient and modern masterpieces while visiting Bogotá, Paris, Florence and Mexico City, like the sixteenth-century young noblemen who furthered their classical training by immersing themselves in French and Italian art. He greatly admired the works of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the prolific draughtsman, who influenced his adoption of curved lines and rejection of canonical proportions.

In this watercolour Botero plays with volume, depicting a voluptuous female figure in sober, muted tones. With her right arm raised and her hand tangled in long blonde tresses, she evokes representations of the goddess Venus in the Italian Renaissance. While the subject may derive from the Old Masters and Sandro Botticelli, more specifically, Botero’s unique imagery of exaggerated physical forms reveals a radically new mode of expression. She does not stand demure in the traditional "contrapposto" pose but instead faces forward, her bare skin on full display. Her left hand casually rests on her hip, showcasing her bright red painted nails and the gold bracelet at her wrist. She appears both chaste and seductive. She recalls and simultaneously challenges artistic traditions; existing in the "territorio manchado". As described in the 2012 exhibition catalogue "Fernando Botero. Celebración": “the stained territory where both worlds are contiguous, where old realities and new realities coexist, where a deranged woman walks the rooftops silently. Her name: imagination.”