Fernando Botero, BOTERO SCULPTURE (hand signed by Fernando Botero), 1987

Fernando Botero

BOTERO SCULPTURE (hand signed by Fernando Botero), 1987

Hardback monograph with dust jacket (hand signed by Fernando Botero)

Hand signed by Fernando on the first front end page

13 × 11 1/2 × 1 1/2 inches

Unframed

Provenance
Hand signed for the present owner at Fernando Botero Sculpture exhibition at Marlborough Gallery on October 24, 2012.

This gorgeous , lavishly illustrated hardback monograph with dust jacket was hand signed on the first front end page for the present owner at Fernando Botero Sculpture exhibition at Marlborough Gallery on October 24, 2012. Makes a superb gift.

Book information:
Publisher: Abbeville Press, 1986
English; Hardback; 171 pgs with color and bw illustrations

Editorial Reviews:
From Publishers Weekly
It's impossible not to like Fernando Botero's sculpture, an outgrowth of the Colombian artist's constant search for three-dimensionality that pervades his popular paintings of puffy endomorphs. His sculpted women are monumental oceans of flesh, beckoning and vulnerable at once; the Little Whore with her elephantine thighs parodies our carnal urges. His statues peer out anxiously with small eyes as if seeking a meaning to life. In creating a plump general, a bishop or a Roman soldier, Botero mocks the fixity of energies channeled into manipulation, power and control. Boisterous and touching at once, with echoes of pre-Columbian art, his oversized sculptures are a human comedy for our time. A gleaming polychrome snake, a whimsical horse with tresses and a winsome plaster dog are also within the reach of this versatile artist, who is now based in Italy. Fifty color plates and 125 duotones complement an intelligent text by Sullivan, who teaches art history at New York University.

From Library Journal
In this very beautifully produced volume, Sullivan offers the most comprehensive investigation of Botero's intriguing and sometimes bizarre images. Sullivan does an exemplary job of research into the Colombian and native traditions to be found in Botero's sculpture (and much of what he points out is equally applicable to Botero's work in other media). Botero scholarship in English has seldom dealt so well with these iconographic and formal issues. The massive figures so omnipresent in Botero's work, in Sullivan's view, express the artist's pre-Columbian roots as well as his interest in Western art traditions. Botero is probably the most important and most well-known Latin American artist at work today, so the mislabeling and reversal of some images in the book is quite irritating.

About Fernando Botero:
Perhaps the most famous contemporary Latin American artist, Fernando Botero (b. 1932-2023). After a stint at a matador school, Botero decided art was his true calling and in 1948, aged 16, he had his first exhibition. In the early 1950s Botero travelled through Europe, studying art at Madrid's Real Academia de Bellas Artes de San Fernando, followed by a spell in Paris spent absorbing the works of the Old Masters at the Louvre. He continued to Florence, where he studied the frescoes of the Italian Renaissance, discovering techniques from a bygone era.

Botero was best known for his distinctive style of smooth inflated shapes with unexpected shifts in scale which reflects the artist's constant search to give volume presence and reality. His oeuvre ranges in subject matter, including daily life in Colombia, art historical references like the Mona Lisa, and abuses of power- all unified his exaggeratedly rotund figures.

He has created monumental sculptures for public spaces in many major cities, including New York (Park Avenue), Paris (Champs-Élysées), Rome and Monte Carlo. His works are found in many important private and public collections, such as the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Smithsonian Institution (Washington, D.C.); Ho-am Museum (Seoul); Israel Museum (Jerusalem); Kunsthalle Nuremberg (Nuremberg); Museo d'Arte Moderna del Vaticano (Rome); Museum Moderne Kunst (Vienna); Neue Pinakothek (Munich); Staatgalerie Moderne Kunst (Munich); Tel Aviv Museum of Art (Tel Aviv); The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York); The Museum of Modern Art (New York); and The Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum (New York).
Courtesy of Opera Gallery